


Pavlov's Cell

by SailorSue



Series: Pavlov [1]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Drama, Gen, Kidnapped Spencer Reid, No dogs involved despite the title, Psychology, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-01-03 15:08:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 34,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21181463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SailorSue/pseuds/SailorSue
Summary: Stimulus. Response. Reward.An unsub gives Reid a personal insight into behaviorism.





	1. Return

**Author's Note:**

> Firstly, Criminal Minds isn’t mine; I solemnly promise to give the characters back more or less as I found them.  
Nextly, please don’t try this at home! I certainly haven’t, and I doubt any of the ‘cutting edge research’ I’ve made up / alluded to here would end well.

Practice doesn’t make perfect: practice makes _permanent_.

~

**Return**

“What the hell is this?” The sound of Alex Blake’s voice ricocheted around Spencer Reid’s thumping brain.

With some difficulty, he focused on the phone in his hand. “Uh...?” Was he meant to _guess_?

“_What_ have you just sent me, Spencer?”

He honestly had no idea. He sat down on his chair, misjudging the height a little, and let out a small ‘ouf’ of surprise.

“Spencer? Are you still there?”

He nodded: one FBI agent still arguably present. His eyes roved across his desk, blurring vision taking in small inconsistencies - his books stacked to the side, a pen on top of unfamiliar case files, Henry’s picture tucked behind a printed phone list, the mouse to the left of the keyboard.

“Spencer?”

He picked up the pen and weaved it round his fingers, considering. Small, scratched: this pen was well-loved. And not his. “Erm, what...” He tailed off, unsure what to even ask.

“For Peer Review: _Do you mind_?” Alex said, and it took a moment for Spencer to realize the question was rhetorical. “Reid, S (2019). In consideration of the ability to make conscious decisions on behavior when exposed to stimuli and reinforcement in a highly controlled environment. Spencer, this research is _horrifying_. How did you get it past an ethics committee?” There was silence on the line. Alex’s voice turned accusatory. “Reid? Did you even submit it?”

This, this wasn’t right. Spencer let the handset drop away from him as he whispered, “I don’t think so,” his voice scratching at his throat. His desk was being used by someone else. There was way, way too much space around him. He listened: there was background noise of clacking keys, water boiling, and chairs scraping. An elevator pinged followed by hurried footsteps. “Alex,” he croaked, heedless that the phone now lay by his feet, “Why are you...? I mean, what...” He heard a gasp and turned to the sound, but couldn’t see more than a smear of color. 

“My computer beeped to say you’d used your building pass and I didn’t believe it because there’s no way you would just walk casually back into the BAU after all this time as if nothing had happened.” The voice attached to the blur was gabbling as it approached. Had he used his pass? He considered. He usually didn't spend time thinking about how he arrived at places; he just appeared. He couldn’t remember arriving this time either.

He was pulled to his feet and engulfed in a hug. “You’re so thin! How did you get back? _When_ did you get back? Why didn’t you tell me?” He could smell perfume, shampoo, deodorant, herbal tea, hairspray, fabric conditioner... it was overwhelming. There was an explosion of salt on his lips: was he crying, or was she? “Do the others know? They can’t do, or they would have told me. Oh! They’re going to be so excited. Where’s your phone? Are you cleared for work? Who are you talking to? Spencer?” The sound of his name collided in his ears, coming from both Garcia and Alex. He jittered and fell back into his wrong height chair. The sensation of material on his legs registered and he ran his hand experimentally up and down his leg, relishing the feel of the corduroy and managing to tune out Garcia’s interrogation of Alex. For a while he faded, eyes closed, letting little bits of forgotten touch, smell and sound process gently in his mind.

His peace was rudely interrupted with a glare of light. He yelped. “Pupils sluggish but even,” a nearby voice said. Spencer clutched his head in agony. “You say he’s been missing? Did he get a medical assessment when he got back?”

“I’m not sure,” Garcia said. “Spencer, sweetheart, can you hear me?”

Medical assessment? He hadn’t had one of those. Just popped into existence here, remember. He pressed his palms into his skull in a vain attempt to quell his headache. He needed everything to be _less_ for a bit. This was too vivid. “Only me here,” he mumbled, and his head wobbled in concert with his pounding skull. “No one to assess.”

But the voice wouldn’t release him that easily. “Can you tell me your name?” it asked.

Spencer nodded, careful of his wobbly head.

“Use your words,” Garcia begged.

“Yeah,” he replied. And then, when they sighed, “Pr- Professor Reid.”

“…day it is?”

He carefully considered what might be an acceptable reply. “April?” He pointed at the crocuses now spouting by his feet. “Spring anyway,” he added.

“What…?” Garcia sobbed and Spencer, sensing that his words had been wrong somehow, faded out and didn’t answer.

**Later**

Shifting experimentally, Spencer decided he was warm and comfortable, even able to snuggle under material covering him. For a moment, he did just that, even while his closed eyes winced against brightness. His ears reported electronic hum, someone breathing nearby, and the swish of a blind being drawn. The light level dimmed so he blinked his eyes open to see who was with him.

“Reid?” said Garcia’s voice, presumably attached to the person-shaped blur standing by the window. Heels clipped against the floor and he felt his hand being taken. The sensation of movement, heat and pressure was so amazing he gasped. He curled his fingers around Garcia’s and laced ivy between them, deliberately weaving a more secure connection so she couldn’t leave. He scanned her anxious face, her mouth moving in words he wasn’t listening to, her forehead wrinkling in a concerned frown.

For a while he just lay there, reveling in the serenity of the moment. When next he focused, it was Emily sitting there holding his hand. “Welcome back, stranger,” she said.

He liked that she had come with him to this strange experience. “Still here, Em,” he assured her, and she smiled at him. 

“…mostly clean bill of health.” He watched her mouth, her words suddenly fleeting while his mind sluggishly kicked into gear. Everything _was_ different. Why? “Some trouble with distance vision …dentist in your future.” Her eyes darted off to a corner of the room. Spencer twisted to see what was there and picked out a white blur haloed against a bright background. When he looked back at Emily, she was studying him curiously. “Can you …happened, Reid?” she asked, her words warping and waning as they rattled around his disorientated brain. 

Before he’d formulated a reply, Spencer noticed the verb tense. Happen_ed_? His heart thumped, his breath caught and his mind seized. For a moment he flinched against the sounds of alarm and agitated voices hitting his ears. And then he turned it all off and just lay there relaxing as someone stroked his hand.

“Here’s my theory,” Alex said. Spencer pried open his eyes ready to debate it with her. “Oh,” she said, squeezing his hand in welcome. “Look who’s back awake.” She cocked her head and considered him. “I’ll tell you later,” she said, and after a while Spencer realized her words weren’t for him.

He tightened his grip on her hand. “What theory?”

Alex looked away from him for a moment. “Uh, okay,” she said when she turned back. “I think that maybe this paper of yours is real.”

Spencer looked at the object she was waving as she spoke. Whatever it was, it wasn’t paper. He choked back his disappointment; for a moment there, he’d actually had hope. He assembled his answer in his brain and, when it was ready, spoke. “Your hypothesis would require substantive objects to demonstrate persistence,” he choked out. “If the paper isn’t real, _Alex_, then I’d say that invalidates your conjecture.” Speech given, he flopped back into his comfortable nest and turned away from the unwelcome illusions. In his experience, they’d be gone when he woke up.

“...had study group after school so Will’s going to stop by with him later. We’ve let him know you’re struggling to know what’s... well, anyway, try not to upset him. He’s just a kid and he’s missed you.”

_Henry’s coming_, Spencer thought. And then: _We should go to the forest_.

It took focus to build his forest, but practice had made it routine. Before long he could feel the dappled sunlight warming him, hear the birdsong and breathe in the earthy tones.

“Spence...” JJ said coming up behind him. “What’s going on?”

“It’s the Overall Run trail,” he replied, circling on the spot, arms wide to share its effortless beauty. “I thought we could set up a picnic by the falls.” For a moment, she looked like she was going to object. Spencer closed his eyes, and when he looked at her again, she was staring at the waterfall, transfixed. “Henry would like it here,” he whispered. “And... I’ve missed him.”

“He’s at study group. Can you wait a bit?”

They both looked down at the luxurious picnic spread, neither moving. The moment stretched and stretched between them. “It’s only imaginary food, JJ,” he said at last. “It’ll keep as long as we want it to.”

She acknowledged this with a twist of her mouth. “What’s happened, Spence?” she asked. “What’s going on in there?”

He wound a vine around a spray-splattered rock and chased it with moss and lichen. A narrow shaft of sunlight broke through the foliage and formed a shimmering rainbow across the cascade. “I’m okay, JJ,” he reassured her. “I’m fine. Everything I really need is here.”

**Later**

“Reid? Are you with me?” Spencer slowly swiveled his head around to take in the barren interview room. Two plain chairs held himself and Tara. There was a shut door, a strip light overhead which was currently turned off, weak light filtering through a closed blind, a wide mirror, an empty side table, a coarsely carpeted floor, plain plasterboard walls, and a tiled ceiling. He could hear the quiet, steady shhhh of ventilation alongside their breathing and someone shifting their feet outside the door. He processed faint smells of sweat and deodorant. Dust tickled his nostrils, clothes rubbed his skin, warmth from the ventilation streamed around his head. He looked down: he was back in the cords again. The outfit seemed to come with a button-down shirt, shoes and odd socks. He ran his hand over the shirt - soft cotton, short sleeves, blue.

Eventually, he looked across at Tara. She was sitting still, a carefully neutral expression on her face. “Take your time,” she said. He nodded.

The shoes felt too constricting so he first untied and then pulled them off. Tara took them from him and wordlessly placed them in a corner.

He stood and padded his way over to the light switch. Light and sound zapped his senses as he flipped the switch first on then hurriedly back off. He tried the door handle and found it locked.

“Code is 543,” Tara said.

He found the small keypad under the handle and punched the numbers. When he tried the handle again, the lock smoothly disengaged. He cracked open the door and the volume of noise immediately rose, as did the number of scents. He pushed it shut and returned to his chair. He clasped his hands in his lap and looked down. They’d done a good job of reducing the sensory input assailing him; he appreciated the effort.

“Okay,” he told both her and the unseen watchers outside the room.

He heard Tara’s breathing become deeper and let himself mimic her. “Reid, I’m Doctor Tara Lewis,” she began, timbre low, pacing slow. “We’re currently in Quantico.” She gave him time to absorb this. When he didn’t object, she continued, “You arrived back here a few days ago. You’ve been missing since August.” After a moment, she added, “How much of that are you able to fully accept?”

Spencer considered her question. “I’m Spencer Reid,” he decided, hands twisting. “I’ve been missing since August.”

If Tara was dismayed by his omissions, she didn’t let on. “I’d like to try a cognitive interview with you to recollect what happened,” she said.

Spencer glanced up sharply. “I have perfect recall,” he objected.

Tara looked like she was about to say something, then stopped herself. “Okay then,” she agreed. “Take it from the start for now and tell me what you remember.”

**The Cell**

**About 2 hours in, months earlier**

Of all the discomforts he was currently experiencing, Spencer was trying not to mind about the dark the most. The FBI agent in him was noting the cool, stale air and hard, unforgiving floor and was working on a threat assessment.

But it was a really, utterly, pitch black, can’t see your hand in front of your face, trapped-deep-underground-with-monsters type of dark. It was taking some effort to overcome his fear.

Unbidden, his breathing sped up. He fought to get it under control, determined to avoid showing any unnecessary weakness if someone had the advantage over him here. He closed his eyes against the void, surrendered to his shivers and worked through the rush of adrenaline. Breathe in, force it out. Again. And again.

“Is anyone else here?” he called when the shakes had been banished, voice sure and projecting just the image of competent FBI agent he was after. He noted that his tone sounded deadened somehow, as if he were in a small space. “Can we talk about this?”

Silence. Reid listened, a slight rasp coming into his breathing as he realized that - in the same way as the dark was somehow more total than he’d ever experienced before - this silence was off-the-scale absolute. He couldn’t hear _anything_. Not a distant hum of voices, not a whisper of wind, not the buzz of electronics, not the drip of a tap; no tick of his watch nor rustle of clothing. Just his heart slamming and his breath catching…

He fought his panic response again. Breathe in, sharp exhale. He needed to work out what was going on.

He stayed lying prone and traced his fingers over the floor finding smooth plastic overlaid with wire mesh. He fisted his hand and tapped; the resultant clunk was dull and lacked echo: the floor was resting directly on something else.

The wire mesh was woven into diamonds of about 5 cm across, and was so taut he could only just worm a finger underneath. Plucking at a section of it made a small twang of sound. Where one wire crossed over another a small raised knot of metal was formed - uncomfortable where it was digging into him.

On which subject, there was far too much metal pressing directly into him. He transferred fingers to his torso and catalogued missing clothing. No pants, so there went his credentials, main gun and phone. Shirt and watch: absent. Shorts (hurrah): present. He stretched and didn’t find his backup, unmatched socks or shoes.

He sighed, resigned.

Isolate and ensure vulnerability. Tick both off.

He kept his eyes closed and rubbed his face, considering. He had no noticeable additional facial hair growth. His body wasn’t complaining of being particularly hungry or needing relief. It should be safe to assume no more than 3 hours had passed since he’d last been conscious.

Reaching out, he unseeingly smacked his hand into more metal. A wall this time, formed into ripples running up and down. He strummed the back of his hand across the ridges, and listened as the reverb fell off instantaneously. So externally this side was up against something too, and it was packed in tight, filling any gaps where the metal rippled inwards. He tentatively stood and reached up, touching the ceiling not quite 8 feet above him. His light punch once more gave a deadened clunk. He put his hand back to the wall and ran it along the side until he encountered a corner. The next wall was of the same strange, wavy metal and it too was against something outside. Mesh still covered the floor; questing fingers found a robust securing eyebolt in the corner. Reid, beginning to get an idea, swallowed down his discomfort.

A few cautious shuffles took him about 8 feet to the next corner. Again, the new wall was corrugated and packed against something. Again, the floor was mesh secured to an eyebolt in the corner. He felt his way towards the final wall. He came across it earlier than he’d expected and encountered something different about it. Instead of rippled metal, the surface was a mixture of flat metal and glass panels of varying sizes. Narrow metal ridges ran up and across the entire area. Knocking against the ridges resulted in a _ting_. Knocking against the panels varied. Some clunked and some gave back what was almost a musical tone. It felt and sounded for all the world like a shelving unit which had been filled flush with drawers, some full, some empty. There were no handles and no catches. In fact, Reid caught his breath… he’d been all around this place and hadn’t yet found a _door_.

Okay, don’t panic. He hadn’t materialized in here. Comb over this cell inch by inch to find the door.

He combed. Twice.

No door.

No floor or ceiling trapdoor either.

The shelves had to have been put in place after he’d been dumped. He felt around the sides, top and bottom. The mesh disappeared underneath the unit. The edges were flush to the indented ripples at the side, and there was only a tiny space at the top. He took a more direct approach and threw his body weight against the obstruction, bouncing off with no resultant, satisfying screech of metal moving. He tried again anyway, testing different areas of the shelving unit before finally admitting defeat.

Backing away to the far wall, rubbing his sore shoulder, Reid tried to work out what was going on. He was stripped to the point of physical and psychological discomfort, but wasn’t naked. He was engulfed in ominous, dark silence. He should probably assume he was under observation, that an infrared camera lay behind one of those glass panels.

He couldn’t get out.

Where did that leave him? Sealed inside a buried shipping container with just these impenetrable shelves for company. This cell was ominous in its simplicity; even solitary had offered more creature comforts than this.

He sat down, intermittently shifting against the uncomfortable mesh, to wait his captor out.

**Later**

“You were held in a buried shipping container?” Tara clarified.

Spencer massaged his temples. “Actually, two. There are two. Connected. I just... I didn’t find that out at first.”

Tara made a note. “Okay, we’ll get to that later then. Do you need a break?”

“No, I’m fine. Keep going.”

Tara nodded. “You mentioned that you thought you had been unconscious for a maximum of three hours. Can you tell me your last clear recollection from before you went missing?”

Spencer’s mind reached out unbidden towards the Gap. “No,” he mumbled, forestalling the free-fall by gently starting to weave trees and birds and dappled sunlight.

“‘No’ as in you can’t...” but Tara faded as his wriggling toes stirred up algae gathered in the bed of the stream, a light breeze gently ruffling his hair.


	2. Sanitation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for self-harm in this chapter

**Later**

Spencer winced and drew his aching hand back into his lap, massaging his palm against the pain left over from slamming it on the button. The button itself sat innocuously until Tara quietly picked it up and handed it off to someone outside the door. She came back with a glass of water instead. He silently accepted the peace offering.

Dammit, somehow they _knew_.

Tara sat back down and picked up her notepad, pretending to read a note while he collected himself. “Let’s go back to where we left off,” she said after a while. “You were waiting for the unsub to make contact.”

“Yeah,” he agreed shakily.

“Did you have to wait long?”

“I don’t...” He reconsidered his reply. “I mean...”

Tara looked up and gave him a sympathetic smile. “You’re safe here, Reid. Take your time.” He nodded and took a breath.

“I was... I was asleep. But I could tell time had passed.”

**The Cell**

**About 14 hours in, months earlier**

Reid jerked awake, sure that something had pulled him from his slumber. At first, he couldn’t work out what had changed. He was still chilled and still lying on an uncomfortable floor. His need for relief was gradually becoming more urgent. But there was a thin ribbon of dancing light above the shelves and then he heard a faint noise: a small squeak of rubber-soled feet on a metal floor. He scrambled upright and fixed his gaze on the wavering light. “Hey!” he called. “Who’s out there?”

He held his breath and listened hard. Nothing but silence drummed against his ears. Above the shelves, the light steadied for a moment, then resumed its dance across the ceiling. It did little to illuminate his surroundings - the shelves were still a foreboding, shadowed barrier, and he could only make out his hand by the interruption in the ribbon of light - but still, something was better than nothing.

“Why are you doing this?” he tried next. “At least let’s talk about it; maybe I could help you.”

This time there was no reaction from the light. But he could hear the soft squeak of footsteps, the odd tap and click of keys being pressed or maybe switches being made. When he heard the rattle of a metal drawer being adjusted, he took a step towards the shadowed shelves to feel for any opening.

Or at least, that was his intent. His legs suddenly spasmed against pain in the soles of his feet. He gave a startled cry as his heart pounded and his need to urinate became acute. The sensation passed as quickly as it had arisen, leaving him gasping in reaction.

What the _hell_?

He curled his feet, testing for residual pain. The muscles jittered a little but other than that, he couldn’t detect anything wrong. He closed his eyes and focused on getting his heart rate and breathing back under control.

For a brief moment, an electrical current had run through that floor, and he’d just been shocked with it.

There was something vaguely familiar about this: the cell, the electrified floor, the dark. His mind whirred while he tried to trace the source. Before he was able to do so, there was a brief blare of sound, and then a snick brought back silence. He opened his eyes again. The ribbon of light was gone, but the shelving now boasted one small orange light, low down on the left. The light cast a weak glow into his space. He looked down at himself and around, confirming with his eyes what he already knew: he was almost naked, and he was trapped in a small, barren space within a shipping container.

He balanced onto his toes and arranged his feet to minimize contact with the mesh. Taking a cautious step forward towards the light, he avoided stepping on the metal as much as possible.

Nothing.

He dared to stand properly and took a further step, close enough to examine the shelves. The panel with the light was about a foot high, narrower than it was tall. He remembered discovering a metal panel of that size during his exploration yesterday.

He focused on the light: a small LED was enclosed within a round, orange-tinted button. It had the word ‘PUSH’ printed on the cover. Reid felt his mouth drop open.

A cell with an electrified floor.

No control of his limited environment.

Actions for him to take.

He _knew_ what this was. He’d just never seen a cell like this human-sized before.

After a moment of pure disbelief, he reached out a shaking finger and pressed the button. It gave way smoothly under light pressure. A millimeter in, the LED went out and he heard the snick of a magnet disengaging. Swallowing back the fear which reared as dark snapped into place around him - for after all, hadn’t he done exactly what the unsub wanted here? - he continued to push gently. The metal panel which had held the LED tilted and then recessed smoothly into the shelving unit, top first. He dropped his hand to the space revealed behind the panel, finding a handle. He wrapped his fingers around it and tugged.

What sounded like a drawer pulled out from the shelves smoothly, although he found he had to keep a light pull on the handle to avoid it sliding back again. He doubled his efforts as his nose was assailed by the strong reek of formaldehyde. Keeping one hand wrapped around the handle, he carefully traced the outline of the object inside the drawer. As soon as he was confident that he’d revealed nothing more sinister than a chemical toilet, he contorted his frame to relieve himself.

Once he was done, he stepped back. He heard the drawer gently slide shut, followed by a click, metal moving and then another small click - the magnet re-engaging at a guess. He blindly reached down and tried to press the button or move the metal panel, and was not in the least surprised to find he could do neither.

He backed up to the far wall and contemplated whether it was safe for him to sit when he could be zapped at any time. Safe, he decided, and sat. If this was what he thought it was, the shock had been administered in retribution for something he’d done - either talking or approaching the shelves while they were attended. Just sitting here shouldn’t trigger it.

He knocked his head gently back against the metal wall, grimacing at the dull thunk it caused. Now what? - sitting in a room designed to be without stimulus was going to be a unique torture. He had absolutely nothing to do but think or fret.

**Later**

“I’m in an Operant Conditioning Chamber,” Spencer clarified. “Colloquially known as a Skinner Box.” Tara sat quietly while he squirmed. “This is usually the point you say something like, ‘What’s the unsub thinking, putting someone trained in behavioral psychology in here?’” Of all the stupid places to end up.

“You’re in Quantico, Reid.” Tara’s voice was even: unthreatening and non-judgmental.

He nodded, too quickly. “Right.” He reached a shaking hand for his water and took a sip. Condensation made the outside of the glass slippery so he set it down and wiped his trembling, damp fingers on his cords. At first, the material darkened underneath his touch but the water quickly evaporated from both his hand and pants in the air-conditioned room.

He pursed his lips. Actually, why did he have a _glass_?

He found he couldn’t answer the question. After a moment’s deliberation, he picked the object up again and threw it away from Tara, against the far wall. The glass shattered on impact, raining water and shards of glass down onto the carpet and creating a small, wet dent of impact in the plasterboard.

He snuck a look at Tara and caught her surprise before she schooled her expression. He waited for more, but when she continued to sit there placidly, he got to his stockinged feet and padded across to examine the mess he’d created. Beads of water sat on the carpet, slowly settling into the treated, close weave. He knelt down and pressed his forefinger into one, breaking the surface tension and causing the liquid to quickly sink out of sight.

Frowning, he reached out for a shard and picked it up, twisting it here and there to watch the weak light shimmer and refract. After a moment, he pressed the shard into his arm, forcing the skin beneath to stretch and pale. Behind him, he sensed Tara get to her feet.

He pressed a little harder, balancing on the brink. Pain registered, sharp and dangerous. He took a shuddering breath and withdrew the pressure. Pocketing the shard, he examined his arm, brushing away small bobbles of blood.

No wonder the unsub wouldn’t give him a glass.

He let Tara help him to his feet and across to his chair. She sat too, expression once more carefully neutral. “What was that about, Reid?” she asked.

What indeed? He felt as if he was poised between here and there, maybe and maybe not; half lucid and half freewheeling off a precipice. He frowned to himself; here in his dark and silent Cell the only items of substance were Shelf and Cell. When he touched them, sometimes they would touch back and sometimes - more often than not recently - he’d fallen right through them.

He looked down at the fading mark on his arm; it still stung. Classic use of pain to counter dissociation, he told himself. The question was: was it working? A twitching finger traced through the smeared, drying blood. He scratched a wavering line next to the mark with his fingernails.

How frighteningly easy it would be to slide into another self-destructive behaviour.

“Can you give me the glass from your pocket?”

The easy manner in which the query was delivered belied the tension behind the loaded question. He’d played this game from the other side and knew it didn’t end with him retaining the shard; Tara wanted to know if he would be able to bring himself to surrender it. He dug into his pocket and handed it over with an apologetic shrug. “Sorry,” he said, carefully casual, but couldn’t stop his eye tracking her hand as she took it from him. As she hid it from sight, he looked up at her and realized she was watching him closely. “I’m sorry,” he said again, and meant it this time. She wanted a colleague back and instead was dealing with this messy, overwhelmed victim. Still he could offer her something. After all, the glass had _hurt_. “You’re Doctor Tara Lewis,” he said. “And somehow I’m back in Quantico... although I really don’t understand how.”


	3. Water

**6th floor interview room, Quantico **

**08:30 the next day**

They’d kept a watch on him overnight, fed him food he could eat without utensils and accompanied him to the washroom. Emily had tutted, but he’d been grateful - his need to escape isolation overriding his embarrassment at being thought capable of serious self-harm.

He’d asked for a watch; Rossi’s designer timepiece had resulted and was currently weighing down his wrist. It gave out a steady tick as it delineated each second from the next and jangled a bit when he moved his hand. The strap also dug into his arm when he pressed it just right, the mild pain serving to ground him in reality.

“How are you today, Reid?” Tara asked as Alvez returned him to the barren, dimly-lit interview room. He noted with wry humor that his water was now in a paper cup. The carpet had been thoroughly dried, although they hadn’t managed to conceal the dent in the wall.

He dragged his gaze away from the damage and mustered a smile. “Everything is getting less blurry,” he told her as he sat. “It’s a start, I guess.”

She gave a murmur of agreement, body language open and encouraging. For a moment he was irritated at her restraint, missing the snarky, irreverent Tara of his imagination. But only for a moment. He was somehow _here_, out in the real world, and together they were going to need to dig through his recollections to find the unsub who’d done this to him. He was ready for business.

“Reid, my name is-”

“Doctor Tara Lewis,” he interrupted softly, hands twisting in his lap. “We’re in an interview room at Quantico. I appeared here last week after being missing for... um, well, since August.” He leaned forward in his chair and carried on speaking, voice determinedly steady. “I don’t know who took me, how they took me, where I was kept or how I got back here.” As he listed each point, he ticked it off on a finger. “I don’t fully know why they took me, although I have my suspicions. I’d really like to find out.”

To her credit, Tara adjusted quickly. “Welcome back, Doctor Reid.” She set her notebook down. “Did you know Doctor Blake was sent an academic paper for review purportedly written by you?”

“_Do you mind_?” he remembered, thinking back to the hazy day of his return. “In consideration of the ability to make conscious decisions on behaviour when exposed to stimuli and reinforcement in a highly controlled environment.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “We’ve been working under the assumption that you were the test subject. Were you the author too?”

Reid bit his lip. That was a more complex question than Tara realized. “I- I didn’t administer the conditioning on myself, if that’s what you mean,” he hedged.

“Good to hear,” she replied easily. And then raised an amused eyebrow. “But try again, genius. You know that’s not what I was asking.”

Yeah, he hadn’t thought it would be that easy. “I... You see... It was...” Dammit, how was this helping work out what had happened to him? He was going to have to admit his part. “You need to understand I’ve been in complete isolation.”

“No human contact,” Tara agreed.

“No. That’s not even close,” Spencer corrected. His fingers twitched towards Rossi’s watch and he pressed it, hard, into his arm. “I underwent sensory deprivation for most of the time. No light, no external sound. Just a small, empty space.” Cold, silent loneliness the oppressive accompaniment to his fear-filled limbo. He shuddered and briefly closed his eyes. “Long term sensory deprivation is regarded as a form of torture for a reason. It causes paranoia, hallucinations, and despair. Victims will do literally anything to escape it.”

“Okay,” Tara said. “Go on.”

“I was asked to describe my reactions to administered stimuli.” He drummed his fingers on his bouncing knee. “I was desperate, Tara. I was losing touch with reality. And suddenly I was being offered a lifeline to Outside - proof I still existed. I can’t describe the sense of relief. So, yes, I colluded. I probably dictated most of that paper.”

Tara pulled her notepad closer. “No one’s faulting you, Reid.” She calmly pretended to read her notes until he’d stopped jittering. “How about we compare? Why don’t you take me through what you know of the stimuli and your resultant behaviors? You’ve already covered pushing the lit PUSH button.”

“Next was some sort of chime,” Spencer recalled. “Every time that rang, I could have access to water.”

“And in conditioning terms...?”

Spencer’s mouth twisted. “Under random interval, immediate positive reinforcement, I was induced to react to an audible stimulus by slamming a button. The positive reward given was water.” He threw Tara an accusatory glare. “You already tested that on me yesterday.”

“We didn’t,” Tara said. And in reaction to Reid’s disbelieving stare, defended, “I’ll tell you, but I warn you now, you’re not going to like the explanation.”

He steeled himself. “Try me.”

She rose from her seat. “It’s probably easiest to show you with a controlled experiment.” She remained standing, and after a moment added, “Would you be okay with that?”

He blinked. Licked his lips. Swallowed. “Uh, tha- thank you for asking. What’s one more conditioning experiment between friends, huh?”

She huffed a laugh and stepped over to the door. It opened as she approached and Emily was there, handing across the button from the previous day, together with an iPhone and a small bottle. “You’re doing really well, Reid,” Emily encouraged. “We’ll take a break after this.” This last part was said to Tara, and did nothing to quell Spencer’s unease. He was missing a part of this puzzle.

Tara broke into his thoughts. “We think it likely the unsub used an easily available sound.” She held the phone out to him. “Try some of the alarms on here and let me know if any sound familiar.”

He hesitantly accepted it and clicked through Apex, Beacon and the like, filling the room with gentle melody. A few more clicks and a familiar chime hit his ears. “That’s it!” he exclaimed and slammed the button. Tara lent across and picked up the phone from where he’d dropped it. He shook out his hand.

“Constellation,” she told him. “Do you need some water?”

Spencer groaned and nodded. “Please.”

“Help yourself,” Tara smiled. She waited while he took a sip. “Okay. Now try standing away from the button, against the wall. When you say, I’ll play Constellation again. This time, I’d like you to count to two before you move to the button. Tell me the logic behind that.”

Spencer was on solid ground here. “You’re trying to break my conditioning. It’s unlikely I’ll be able to fully resist pressing the button, but I should be able to force myself to wait a moment. The idea is to gradually build up my resistance by making me wait longer and longer each time.”

“It’ll be an exceedingly unpleasant feeling,” Tara warned.

“I know.” Spencer backed up to the wall. “I did this all the time in the Cell. Well, at first anyway. I had to stop when the voltage got too much.” He shrugged away Tara’s sympathetic wince. “I’m working under the assumption you aren’t going to shock me here.” Then an idea stuck him and he pretended to look anxiously at the floor. “At least, I don’t _think_ you are.”

They shared a welcome laugh. “I promise, no punishment if you fail, Reid.” She fixed him with a steely glare. “But I’m confident you can do this.”

Fortified by her faith, he flattened his palms against the wall. Took a deep breath. “Okay, then I’m ready.”

Melody. Step checked with a monumental effort of will.

“One!”

Heart racing, headache pounding, vision narrowing.

“Two!”

Step, step. Slam.

The paper cup was thrust into his hand. He choked on the water he attempted to swallow. After a minute of coughing and spluttering, he was recovered enough to groan into his lap, “Oh, god. I’ve got 12 more of these to break.”

“This is the bit you’re not going to like, Reid.” Tara’s voice was impossibly soft. With a start, Reid remembered the mysterious bottle and found his heart thumping anew. “Brace yourself.”

“Why? What do you-?” he started to ask, raising his head to face her. Or at least, that was his intention until he instead found himself slamming the button with brutal force. He jumped to his feet, knocking over the chair, and stared aghast at the iPhone, still sitting silent on the table. “What the _hell_?”

Tara handed him the water. He sipped. “So, there’s no easy way to break this to you. The unsub exposed you repeatedly to subliminal stimuli. The conclusion of the paper is that your behavioral conditioning is down just as much to inputs on the margins of what you can detect as it is to all the bells and whistles you already know about. That was highly diluted Chanel Eau de Parfum. You now associate it with a compulsion to press a button.”

His mouth dropped open and the cup fell from his numb hands as he absorbed her words. “Subliminal?” he repeated. “How... how am I going to learn to resist a stimulus when I’m not even aware of it?” His legs gave out beneath him and he collapsed onto the floor. Water seeped into his pants unnoticed.

Tara stepped across and crouched down next to him. “We actually think it might be worse than that, Reid. Most of the subliminal programming is scent orientated. Scents are processed by a more primitive part of your brain. It’s why smells can trigger such strong memories.”

He tried to get his mind around her words. He had a horrible feeling she was trying to tell him they didn’t know how to break this.

“Your brain is reacting to stimuli you can’t consciously detect. Furthermore, we think you’re processing the stimuli using a cognitive pathway which bypasses your conscious decision making. It’s probably entirely autonomous.” 

Emily was suddenly there, and he started to knit trees and vines around her. “I’m so sorry, Reid,” her mouth said as he picked up a leaf and dropped it into the stream. He watched it float away, bobbing and spinning in the current. “We’re doing everything we can to figure out how to help you.”

He lay down in the undergrowth and turned his back on her. A wisp of wind took her to the skies along with her unwelcome words. A centipede crawled across the leaf litter in front of him and he closed his eyes with the comforting image of its furry, unhurried mobility.


	4. Negative Reinforcement

“Rise and shine, Spencer!” Emily sang out, jerking him awake to the chill emptiness of the Cell. He curled his bare legs up to his chest, seeking comfort as much as warmth, and grumbled a vague greeting back at her. Hunger and thirst coiled within him but respite was due for neither. He ignored the illusory light bouncing against his closed eyelids knowing that if he looked he’d see only confusing swirls and sparks. The murmur of background noise boomed and faded in his ears but he ignored that too, knowing the sound was as baseless as the light. Reality felt a long way away today - even the floor he was sitting on kept morphing away from him. On days like this, it was best to keep in mind Schrödinger’s cat: as long as he didn’t attempt to determine whether he still existed, he couldn’t conclusively prove that he _didn’t_.

It was better to take his mind far, far away from his miserable present. He’d read research on avoiding mental health disorders during solitary confinement - otherwise a statistical likelihood - through ‘intentional imagination’: a process of deliberately creating and then interacting with complex mental constructs. At first, he’d mulled over the Hamiltonian Path Problem, turning cities to nodes linked by interstate pathways and the entire topography of the United States into polygons, but he’d done that at Millburn too and the memories of _that_ time were too unsettling, so he’d taken instead to fabricating interactions with his team. Specifically, how much progress they were making in finding him.

He heard Tara pull up a chair and sit, writing notes while she waited for him to be ready. He appreciated his illusion’s politeness: Emily had a tendency to be annoyingly demanding and certainly didn’t wait for his invitation before barging into his Cell. His boss was making small sounds of impatience now, tapping her watch and huffing.

“Reid, I’ve some dry clothing for you,” Tara began when he rolled over and opened his eyes. She was wearing a black pantsuit, her hair freshly washed and smelling of shampoo. A folded pair of pants was being held out to him. He accepted them, the material warm against his palms. “My name is Doctor Tara Lewis. We’re in an interview room at Quantico. I’ve been attempting to determine what happened to you during the months you were held in captivity.” She paused and cocked her head to consider him. “Can you tell me how much of that you accept right now?”

Spencer stared at her in confusion. For a moment, sound roared in his ears, textures brushed against his skin and objects swam past his vision. Then he examined his watch-free arms and felt goosebumps forming on his bare legs. He pressed his back against the unrelenting barrier of the Cell and fought to rein in the cruel spark of hope: “I’m still Spencer Reid,” he mulishly told her. “You haven’t taken that from me yet.”

She hummed, made a note and flipped a few pages. “Okay,” she allowed, worry clear on her features. “Let’s try something different then. Perhaps this might be a good time to say we’ve noticed you disassociating during moments of stress. Is that deliberate on your part?”

Spencer considered her words. His forest sanctuary was private, entry by invitation only. She had never yet been there. “You shouldn’t be asking me about that,” he mumbled.

“Oh?” Tara was back to studied neutrality. “What questions should I be asking you?”

“The research, of course.” He plucked at the carpet, trying to find the wire mesh. “That’s what we were talking about last time you were here.”

“Last time I was here...? You mean in the Cell? Have I been with you there?”

He shot her a look of pure distain for asking such a stupid question; self-evidently she was here with him. “We’re cataloguing stimuli,” he reminded her. “We’ve reached the first negative reinforcement.”

“Negative reinforcement? You mean rather than taking an action to receive a reward, you took an action to stop something unpleasant?”

“Yes.” His hands began to punctuate his points as he became more animated in the lecture. “Of course, I’d been here a few days by that point. I was beginning to feel the effects of the lack of food. I was listless and slow and really hoping for something more nourishing next.”

Tara folded her hands in her lap. “So what happened instead?”

**The Cell**

**About 58 hours in, months earlier**

Reid woke to a brief blare of sound as the unsub came through the external door on the other side of the shelves. He levered himself up into a sitting position on wobbly arms and slumped back against the container sides.

He listened. The shipping container told many tales, if one focused. There was the soft whir of the fan, high up on the left side of the shelves. It had started when he got access to water and not stopped since. His digestive system was gurgling as it came to life, hoping that the arrival of the unsub might mean food.

But what he didn’t hear could be just as telling. There’d never been a groan of metal expanding or contracting under temperature change, reinforcing his belief that the container was buried. Now there was no squeak of soft shoes: the unsub was waiting by the door, listening to him. Reid held his breath and counted.

At the count of ten, the unsub crossed the space to what he presumed was a workstation. Housekeeping tasks were attended to first and so the brutal scent of formaldehyde hit his nostrils as the chemical toilet was reset followed by the sound of gloves being taken off and dropped into a trash can. Liquids sloshing signalled his water supply being topped up. Then soft clicks and whirs spoke of a laptop being plugged in and booted up. A chair was pulled out with a scrape of metal against metal before the space quietened as the unsub first downloaded data and then ejected the disc.

So far, he had a label for everything he’d heard and smelled, and the unsub had created the same flow of sound he’d listened to previously. This time, however, instead of shutting down the laptop and moving back the chair, there were more clicks.

Spencer peered into the darkness, watching for a lit button on the shelves...

...And recoiled in agony, twisting his face into the wall, slamming shut his eyes, and clamping his hands over his ears. Spots and sparks danced over his eyeballs. He moaned as a spike of pain shot through his head. He rocked on the floor, unsure how he’d even ended up there, curled over on his knees.

There was a brief moment of respite. Spencer had time to realise his ears were ringing and his eyes were streaming tears, and then the deafening sound and overwhelming light were back. He doubled down on protecting his ears, pressing his face into his knees to shelter his eyes.

It was cycling, he recognised once the ringing in his ears had died down enough for him to think. 25 agonising seconds of sound and light, followed by 5 seconds filled with only his harsh breathing. After some more time, he fought past his headache to remember that he was in a Skinner Box - ergo this setup was designed to provoke a specific behaviour from him.

Damn it. This cycle was probably going to continue until he figured out how to stop it.

He crawled to the shelves during the next respite, unclamped his ears and swept questing fingers across the panels for the respites after until he finally brushed against a cover which tilted and retracted as he pressed against it. When sound next cut off, he felt into the space revealed, the pad of his finger finding a ridge which extended about a centimetre across. It was surrounded by a small gap before another ridge, then another. He felt down and found the same ridge-gap pattern repeated 3 times in that direction too.

He curled up again. A keypad?

At the next break, he reached out and felt for the centre. He pressed. The button depressed a millimetre or so with a comforting haptic click. When he released the pressure, the button returned and a second later there was a rude burp of unhappy software.

He curled up. Okay, a keypad. He was going to need to type in a code.

Over the next few breaks, he blindly typed in likely combinations: each corner, all the ones, top left to bottom, bottom right to top. Each was accompanied after a second or so by the burping reset sound telling him his guess had failed. Eventually he ran out of candidates. He ran his fingers over the panel for any indentations or braille-like clues, knowing the unsub expected him to succeed in this: there’d be no pattern of behaviour to learn otherwise.

When that search proved fruitless, he cracked open his streaming eyes. Through the blur he could see squares lighting up one by one: a visual clue. Like a demented meerkat he repeatedly ducked and popped up, squinting at a few seconds of blurry sequence before sheltering.

It felt like hours until he had it: a Fibonacci sequence, repeating every 20 seconds. He was going to have to type in 19 digits in a specific order within 5 seconds, or at least one ear was going to be exposed to the damaging decibels.

He decided to have a practice attempt to see how far he could get. At the next break he rocked up, blindly felt for the keypad and frantically hit square after square. At 34 the blasting sound and light assailed him and he fell back into his protective huddle.

55, 89 and 144 left to type.

When he felt ready, he tried again with his eyes open. It went even worse that time, the steady sequence of flashing lights throwing off his rhythm and aim. He didn’t even get to 21 before he was twisting away from the shelves.

He didn’t have time to type in the code during the respite he concluded. He was going to need to enter at least part of it during the seconds of painful stimulus. And since his instinct was to flinch away from the shelves when the light and sound started, he would be risking a reset of whatever he’d typed up if he was still going at the end of the respite period.

So he’d need to start typing during the 25 seconds. He could reach up from his huddle with only one hand, protecting both eyes and one ear… but that still left one ear unprotected.

**Later**

Tara flipped through her notes. “The doctor didn’t detect any significant hearing loss, Reid. Are you sure it was a ship’s foghorn?”

“Yeah.” Spencer uncurled himself from his demonstration. “I did a ‘what do I have analysis’,” he told her. “It turned out I have an earplug on me.”

He waited for her to figure it out, and grinned with her at the image she now must have of him with his shorts hanging out of his ear. “The sequence is always Fibonacci,” he added. “The interval is random, but I seem better now at predicting when it’s going to start and entering the code before…” He trailed off. _Why_ had he gotten better at predicting a random event? That made no sense.

“You’re going to have to face it sooner or later, Spencer,” Emily said. He scowled in response, but she was right, as always.

He’d be able to predict the negative reinforcement if he was subconsciously detecting a subliminal stimulus. So what was real here? He looked across at Emily who folded her arms and raised an eyebrow, challenging him to figure it out.

“Umm… w- wait, please.”

They held still while he wavered. He knew not to trust what he saw and heard - but he could feel that the floor was damp carpet; his arm was itching from a single, deep scratch; the scent from Tara’s deodorant and shampoo was unmistakable. “I was triggered,” he realised. “Wasn’t I?”

Tara bit her lip and nodded sympathetically, picking up her notepad to once again flip pages. Emily leaned over her shoulder to watch. “It says here the subliminal scent is mint,” Tara said when she reached the right page. “Do you want to test it?”

“Umm, sure?” he quavered.

“Okay, take 5 while we get set up. Rossi wants to see whether the strength of the stimulus is significant so the scent is going to be strong enough for you to detect this time.”

He paced the sparse room while he waited, digging his fingernails into his arm and working his way back into reality. Eventually he felt substantive enough to sit on his chair.

When Tara returned, she stuck a 9-digit keypad to the wall and placed a sealed plastic box on the table. “Doctor Reid,” she cordially greeted him as she sat next to him.

“Doctor Lewis,” he agreed. He picked up the box and peered through the plastic sides at its contents. Mint leaves.

Tara’s voice took on an apologetic tone. “Reid, actually, could you lie against the wall with your eyes closed?”

He felt a jolt of betrayal shoot through him, and she scrambled to explain. “We don’t want you injuring yourself when you get off the chair. We’re not sure how violent your reaction is going to be.”

It was a fair point. Spencer wasn’t sure either. He’d mostly found himself at the keypad typing in the sequence. That didn’t mean he had to like it. He moodily got to his feet and lay against the back wall.

“Close your eyes,” Emily reminded him.

He sighed and closed his eyes.

“Okay, I’m opening the box now.”

He heard the plastic lid being removed. And then he was at the keypad, his fingers flying over keys.

Tara waited until he’d finished. “What do you remember of that?”

He ran his hands through his hair. “Hearing the box opening. Typing the last three numbers.”

“No recollection of smelling the mint?”

“No.” He dug his fingernails into his arm. Tara frowned at his action.

“Well, I can tell you that you’re not going to be sitting in that chair while we de-programme you.”

“Great.” He kicked it, earning himself a rebuke from Emily.

“Let’s take a break.” Tara tore her eyes away from watching him mutilate himself and picked up the box of mint leaves, now safely resealed within the plastic box. She stacked her notepad on top of it and gently pushed him aside to lever the keypad off the wall. “I’ll ask Alvez to bring you something to eat.”

He reached out towards her, almost but not quite touching her arm. “Wait!” Tara paused, her fingers reaching for the door-handle. “What about Rossi’s theory?”

“You tell me,” she replied neutrally.

He considered. The mint leaves he’d seen had been crushed, so the scent would have sprung from the box when it was opened, racing around the room. “Okay, so the stimulus doesn’t have to be subliminal to work,” he decided. “That’s good news, right?”

“Right,” she said as she stepped out the room.

Emily raised her eyebrows as if to suggest Tara could have sounded surer. “Yeah,” Spencer told his hallucination. “I wish that too.”


	5. Transfer

**6th floor interview room, Quantico  
** **After lunch**

Tara arrived back in the room carrying a blindfold and a respirator.

“Um, hello?” Spencer questioned.

She handed the items to him. “The blindfold is optional. The respirator is not. We’re moving you to a secured, self-contained unit.”

Dismay coursed through him. “What? Why?” He held up the items in his hands. “And what’re these about?”

She pointed at the blindfold. “That’s so you can eliminate visual input if you are still feeling overwhelmed by stimuli outside this room.”

He promptly discarded the material to the floor. He was managing just fine when Alvez escorted him to the washrooms. Although… that was only a few steps along a plain corridor during excessively quiet moments. In fact, now he thought about it, he rather suspected the route had been cleared every time he was taken along it.

“You sure?” Tara asked, seeing the indecision flicker across his face.

“How far away is this secured, self-contained unit?”

“The other side of the base.” He wavered and she bent to scoop the blindfold up. “Think of it as protecting your eyesight, Reid: you’re still very sensitive to light.”

Emily, when he looked for her, had an expression of focused practicality rather than of sympathy. He scuffed at the moss by his feet. “Can’t we wait until it’s dark?” he asked, and winced at how small his voice suddenly sounded. 

“Reid, this is an active base. It doesn’t _get_ dark.”

“I know. It’s just...” He tailed off, the reason for his aversion to blindfolds unsaid in the face of his colleague’s exasperation. He accepted the material back off her with a shaking hand and stuffed it in a pocket, telling himself it was _just in case_ and he _wouldn’t use it_.

“I’ll be with you every step of the way.”

Emily and Tara spoke in tandem. He nodded and watched as the bugs he’d unearthed from the moss scurried to find shelter. “Why do I have to be moved at all?”

Tara sat, and indicated that he should do the same. “Doctor Reid,” she started and he winced at the formality. “What’s your best guess for how long it’s going to take to overcome all your programming?”

“I… ah...” In the Cell, he’d calculated on a month for each reaction but figured they could be tackled concurrently. The addition of the subliminal stimuli had changed the equation.

“It’s a rhetorical question, Reid. We actually don’t know, because we can’t even get started until we find a way to break habits triggered by stimuli you aren’t consciously processing. And because not all the scents are fully described in the paper, we need to add in the time taken to track them down.”

A wood thrush hopped onto the floor and watched them, threat assessing its chances of reaching the insects he’d uncovered. He held his breath as it twitched a path to his feet and pecked at the moss.

“That’s why the respirator and self-contained location, by the way,” Tara added, drawing him back. “We can’t take the risk that you’ll accidentally come across a triggering scent.”

“Oh.” He shot his head around to Emily who folded her arms and mouthed ‘Sorry Spencer,’ at him.

“As for why it’s secured, we’ll give you codes to get out, but - like here - we hope you won’t use them. Until we understand the full extent of your programming, you’re a danger to yourself and others.”

He twisted the straps of the respirator in his lap. This sounded suspiciously like one step closer to Bennington. “Will you come visit me?” The question slipped out before he had time to consider how it would come across.

Tara stood and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Every day, Doctor Reid. I’ve been released from the team to work with you until you’re ready to come back.”

“Oh.” He heaved a sigh of relief. “Oh! Thank you. I mean, just… thank you.”

**Self-contained, secure unit, Quantico  
** **14:07 the same day**

In the end, they’d decided to add earplugs to his defenses for crossing the base. Tara had held his elbow while he’d shuffled, eyes mostly closed, to the elevator and then, in the parking garage, it had been only a few short steps to the waiting SUV.

Tara had maintained her hold on him while they’d gotten themselves into the back seat of the car. With his sight, hearing and sense of smell all gone, he hadn’t been able to figure out who was driving. As the vibrations from the motor and the gentle jostling of the suspension informed him of their progress, he’d wondered anew how he’d ever made it from the front gate of Quantico to his desk. It made no sense.

When they stopped, Tara gave him a nudge to exit from his side. He took two steps then stumbled over a threshold before being guided to the right. A hand on his chest stopped him and then his ears were tapped. He blinked open his eyes and pulled out one of the earplugs.

“We’re here. I’ll give you a few moments.”

Now the earplugs, blindfold and respirator were sitting on a small side table positioned between two chairs. The room was carpeted. The walls were plasterboard and dent-free. There was a small window covered by a closed blind. The door was a normal internal door. Spencer had left it ajar after finding out that it just took a hefty push to open it. There was a small speaker and a mirror on one wall. The light was controlled by a switch by the door; the same panel also held the control for the room’s air-con: Spencer had set it to bathe him in a steady stream of warm air. Best of all, there was a clock on the wall. 14:07 it told him, and then clicked slowly over to 14:08.

Just as he was wondering whether to explore further, Tara returned. “How about we start by prioritizing everything you think we should be working on,” she said. “There’s a whiteboard in the kitchen if you feel up to it.”

“Sure,” he said, and took a step to leave.

Tara halted him. “Respirator first,” she said. “House rule for outside this room until we know all the triggers. I’m sorry.”

For a moment he wanted to object. Then he slumped, picked it up and pulled it over his face. “I think I can guess what is going to top the list of prioritized actions,” he grumbled indistinctly.

“I don’t doubt it,” she agreed.

**The Cell  
** **About 61 hours in, months earlier**

Reid paced back and forth in the dark. The soles of his feet flinched from the uncomfortable mesh and his fingers dragged against the corrugated sides of the container, the blop-blop-blop sound breaking the oppressive silence.

He knew from his prison experience of solitary confinement that the negative effects of isolation were quick to set in. Then, he’d been justifiably paranoid before they’d even slammed the door on him. It had been the extent of the despair which had taken him by surprise: the sense that the BAU would abandon him sweeping across him that first sleepless night. He’d resisted it, but it had left him breathless with anxiety, curled up beneath a thin blanket on the prison bench. 

Here and now, the sense of abandonment by the world above him was proving harder to rationalize away. A low-level headache was gradually building and his joints ached with tension. If he’d been stored somewhere easy to find, by this point the BAU would have rescued him. His hyper-vigilance wasn’t helping, his eyes and ears jerking and straining in the darkness at every imagined noise.

He was grimy. He was cold. He was hungry. He was reliant on an unsub to fix those things for him.

On top of that, he knew how dangerous the combination of sensory deprivation and solitude was. His brain was already futilely attempting to make sense of the limited information it was receiving from his nervous system, firing off sparks in front of his eyes, ringing in his ears and crawling sensations on his skin. Before long, in attempting to build a coherent reality, it would instead unwittingly construct an elaborate fantasy, complete with persistent auditory, sensory and visual hallucinations. Subjects in trials had seen marching squirrels with sacks over their shoulders, been buzzed by miniature fighter planes, heard music; others had felt as if they were being hit by pellets or zapped with electricity. None had been able to control their experiences; several had effects that persisted beyond the experiment.

Did the unsub know the risks? Assumption: yes. This conditioning chamber was too well set up to be accidental. The unsub would definitely know the dangers.

Did the unsub know he’d know how to fight it?

His breath caught and his eyes opened wide to nothing. If the unsub knew, then he’d been selected _because _he could survive long-term in here. Ergo, the unsub intended to keep him in here long-term.

He should - he _needed_ \- to use what he knew about deliberate imagination to safeguard his mind.

He put his back to the wall, slid himself down to the floor and sat cross-legged. Although it made no difference to what he could see he shut his eyes, put his hands, palm up, on his knees and focused on his breathing.

With thinking about the millennium math problems reminding him too much of prison, he decided to recall a trail he’d driven out to the previous summer. It was far removed from the here and now, and his eidetic memory pulled up the images easily: sun dappled light slicing through glades; pine needles coating a twisting, sandy path; trees reaching far above him, the occasional one toppled and requiring a scramble to get past. He focused and added heat, touch, sound and scents.

This was nice. For the first time he felt warm in here.

**Kitchen of the self-contained, secure unit, Quantico  
** **14:49 the same day**

Tara and Spencer reviewed their plan.

  1. Create a list of triggers and their reactions.
  2. Overcome detectably-triggered reactions.
  3. Gradually re-introduce full sensory input.
  4. Research and test methods to overcome scent triggers.
  5. Attempt to recover memories from The Gap.
  6. Deal with Reid’s hallucinations and paranoia.
  7. Catch the unsub.
  8. Publish the research?

“I’m not at all sure about that last one, Reid,” Tara brooded. “You don’t know the personal cost you’d end up paying.”

He shrugged. It wasn’t as if it was going to come up any time soon. “Are we done now? I’d really like to get this respirator off.”

“Just a sec.” JJ appeared from behind the screen they’d used to block off most of the kitchen. “Take this back with you, Spence.” She handed him a plate of pale food and studied the whiteboard. After a moment she frowned. “Well, I’m not sure which part of that is the most disturbing.”

“The last bit,” Tara said firmly.

“Seeing ‘hallucinations and paranoia’ against my name,” Spencer corrected.

“Why is ‘catch the unsub’ such a low priority anyway? Couldn’t they come after you?”

There was silence for a moment. “No,” Spencer said eventually. “No. They gave me back.”

“I’m…” JJ exchanged a meaningful glance with Tara. “I’m sorry, Spence,” she finished.

Tara thought, massaging her temples. “You’re on a secure base, in a secure unit, Reid. But since we don’t know the circumstances of your release, I suppose we can’t discount the risk. How about we get the team across tomorrow morning and come up with an initial profile for the unsub before we tackle the rest of this?”


	6. Profile

**Secure unit, Quantico  
** **08:30 the following day**

The greetings, hugs and well-wishes were done; the team were gathered around a conference table which was even circular. JJ sat to Spencer’s right, Tara to his left, Alvez, Emily and Rossi across from him; phones were on mute. If it wasn’t for the cumbersome respirator he was wearing, Reid would have felt right at home for the first time in months. As it was, he ducked his head, summoned a pair of dragonflies and set them flitting here and there across the polished tabletop, darting between the coffee mugs and paper files.

“It’s good to see you, Reid,” Emily began. She had her hands clasped together on the table. Spencer’s eyes trailed upwards to her face. She smiled at him, and he gave an uncertain smile back. “You need to let us know if you want a break at any point, ok?” Spencer hesitantly nodded, and her serious gaze switched to Tara. “Can you take us through what you and Reid have covered so far?”

A moment of shuffling paper, sending his dragonflies careering to the opposite side of the table, and then, “We’re looking at a very controlling unsub. There was not a moment of Dr Reid’s captivity which wasn’t precisely regulated. Whether that was sleeping, eating… you name it, the unsub dictated when and how the most basic of human functions were achieved.”

Spencer shifted uncomfortably. Hearing himself talked about in the team’s dispassionate, analytical manner was… not altogether pleasant. The dragonflies, sparkling in a patch of sunlight, lost their color for a moment. He had to focus hard to repaint them.

“- was even made to _think_ in the desired manner.” JJ sounded agitated. With a start, Spencer realized that she was almost as uncomfortable discussing him as a victim as he was hearing it.

“Yes, he was.” Tara sighed. The dragonflies lost their color again. “Unfortunately, some key aspects of Dr Reid’s automated thinking have been compromised. That said, he's retained higher order thinking - his conscious thought processes are his own.”

“I don’t always know what’s real,” Spencer objected. The dragonflies circled lazily around Emily’s laptop for a moment until Spencer sighed and banished them with a flick of his hand.

“You’ve taken protective measures to safeguard your mind from the effects of long-term sensory deprivation,” Tara agreed. “I believe it was a conscious decision on your part which eventually got away from you.”

Spencer nodded minutely.

“What are we talking here?” asked Alvez.

“Disassociation primarily,” Tara said. “Dr Reid continues to feel threatened so his mind won’t release him yet from his constructed refuge.”

“I’m assuming the key word there is _yet_.” Emily’s tone was reassuring, and Spencer found himself warmed by her words. Paranoia was making him doubt himself.

Tara picked up again. “Reid was held in a shipping container which he believes was stored underground.”

“Not that easy to bury a shipping container,” Rossi mused. “You’d need quite a bit of mechanical equipment.”

JJ frowned. “And the knowledge to operate it.”

“Which could suggest someone working in construction,” said Alvez.

Tara’s low tones cut in again. “Or someone with the resources to pay for no questions asked.” No one was going to disagree with this. “Reid was kept trapped behind a solid shelving unit. The shelves were assembled during the few hours he was unconscious on arrival and were ingeniously configured to work as computer-controlled pass-throughs. There’s a diagram in your packs.”

The team flipped pages. Spencer glanced at JJ’s file. An illustrated sketch showed what he already knew: the shelves were simple, single purpose, and devious in design. He scowled and looked away.

To find Tara pointing her pen at him. “Dr Reid should be considered to be an unusually resourceful victim. Yet he was given no opportunity to escape nor to prevent what was being done to him. That doesn’t happen by chance.”

“Yeah. Reid was gone for months,” Alvez observed. “No mistakes in all that time would indicate high levels of organization and intelligence.”

“And unwavering adherence to a routine. The pass-throughs had to be reset regularly.”

“Control, long-term planning,” said JJ. “I’m thinking we’re looking for an offender with experience of managing projects.”

Tara acknowledged the suggestion with a tilt of her head. “Maybe.”

“Corporate projects handle too much uncertainty for an unsub with such need for control,” Emily stated. “They wouldn’t feel comfortable.”

Alvez nodded. “Something small-scale or where the variables can be locked down then.”

“Event management?” JJ suggested.

“Research.” Rossi tapped the open file in front of him. “That would tie in with the academic paper.”

Alvez shrugged. “Either way, retention of power is essential to this unsub. The victim - Reid - had to be dominated at all times.”

“Except the dominance was indirect,” corrected Tara. “His interactions were almost exclusively with a computer, and even that was via pass-throughs.”

Emily narrowed her eyes. “_Almost _exclusively?”

Spencer swallowed and then gulped down air, the scene before him swooping a little.

“You saw the unsub, Spence?” JJ prompted eventually.

He shook his head.

“Talked?”

He nodded, slightly. The wood thrush from the day before hopped onto the table in front of him and he stretched out a shaking hand to it. It took fright and flew away to perch on JJ’s head. Raising his eyes, he met her worried ones.

“You talked with the unsub, Spence?”

And that was the question, wasn’t it. He wet his lips. “Yes, probably,” he whispered. “I’m not… s-sure how real it was. I mean is.” The bird tweeted a cadence of disapproval at him. “_Was_.” Pressing his fingernails into his forearm, he avoided their curious gazes.

“Alright, let’s move on for now,” Emily instructed, taking pity on him. “Dave, what did you find out from Alex?”

Rossi cleared his throat. “Okay. I think what the kid isn’t telling us is that parts of the research paper really are his.” Spencer glanced up sharply at him. Rossi shrugged back. “Blake recognized your word choice and phraseology, kiddo. Some of your insights were at a level which could ‘advance understanding of what humans can do’ if they’re proved.”

Spencer swallowed uncomfortably while Emily swore.

“Blake did also say there would be ethical barriers if anyone tried to emulate the research,” he consoled. “She consulted with a few trusted colleagues about how they would hypothetically run such an experiment. Their conclusion was, and I quote-” Rossi flipped open his notebook to do just that, “-the test environment must have been precisely calibrated. To keep the subject unaware that he was reacting to subliminal stimuli rather than those he detected a moment later would have required timing to within a fraction of a second.”

“Ok. So, our unsub is a detail person,” observed JJ.

Alvez cast a questioning glance at Reid. “Even if he is, that timing accuracy… we’re talking more than entry level technical engineering here?” Spencer gave him a small, unhappy nod of agreement. “Right. Not to mention knowledge of computer programming.”

“Alex’s view was that we should be looking at a disenfranchised senior researcher. One who had faced rejection when trying to conduct similar research through normal channels. _My_ view is that we’re looking at a narcissistic, self-righteous, son of a _bitch_.” Rossi’s fist thumped down on the table, startling them all. “Sorry,” he said a moment later. “It just pisses me off that someone thinks they’ve got the right to do this.” And he waved a hand in Spencer’s general direction.

Spencer jerked back and squirmed under the attention. Emily hastily redirected the conversation. “Thank you, Dave. Luke, you’ve been monitoring the speed of Reid’s recovery.”

Spencer twisted his head to his colleague, eyes wide at the revelation. Alvez avoided his gaze. “Yeah. So, I’ve been tracking a number of specific areas. Reid’s vision, his self-care, and his socialization. In terms of how it relates to the unsub, I’d say it all backs up what we’ve heard so far. The unsub abused Reid’s autonomy in those areas in the name of changing his behavior. Nevertheless, his distance vision and interactions with me have both normalized over the past week or so. He never displayed any abnormal eating habits. I’m kinda not yet sure to what extent he’ll take care of himself: I know he’ll do so if prompted, but I haven’t yet tested whether he needs that prompt.” He gave a quick grimace. “And we know he’s a risk for self-harm - but fortunately he seems to have transformed the instinct to cut himself into clawing his arm.”

Everyone’s gaze turned towards him. Reid’s fingers twitched towards his arm unbidden until JJ laid her hand over his. Turning in surprise to look at her, she gave him a small, sad smile, and squeezed his hand gently. Reid breathed in and out, then smiled back at her, realizing just how much comfort he was taking from that touch.

‘_Hey_’ he mouthed at her.

‘_Hey yourself_’ she mouthed back.

“-wasn’t widespread abuse by a vindictive or malicious unsub; this was targeted action for a specific outcome. Once that outcome had been achieved, Reid was often presented with a way to avoid negative consequences.”

“Which matches the paper.” Rossi added. “When the kid learnt to overcome a particular challenge, another wasn’t set in its place. We’re not looking for a sadist here.”

“Reid never got any mercy,” Tara contradicted.

“Yeah, the unsub never turned off the abuse,” Spencer muttered while Emily busied herself getting Garcia on the line. “I did.”

“You think the unsub enjoyed torturing you?” JJ asked.

Spencer turned his head to look at her, one eyebrow raised in surprise that she was questioning it.

“I’m not so sure. We know the unsub deliberately put in barriers between himself and what was being done to you. I think they selected which computer routines should be operational at any given time and then… just walked away.”

Oh. Reid reviewed what he’d heard of the unsub on the other side of the shelves and frowned; there was something he was missing here. A piece of the puzzle…

“Penelope,” their unit chief broke his train of thought as the connection was made. “I’d like to revisit Reid’s victimology. Could you bring us up to speed?”

“Reid? Victimology? Yes. Yes, I will do that. Just one moment…” There were background sounds of hasty typing. “Okay, so, I checked - _thoroughly - _and with almost 100% confidence, I can tell you that we aren’t dealing with a serial - which of course has ruled out identifying common features between victims.”

“Of course,” Rossi drily agreed.

Tara quirked a smile at him while Alvez smirked. “I think Spencer would like to know what you _did_ find out, Penelope,” Emily suggested.

“Oh! Is he there?” In response, Emily spun the laptop round so it was facing him. Spencer gave Garcia a wave. “Oh, _hey_ there! What’s that on your face?” Spencer’s cheeks flushed with embarrassment and he raised his free hand to the respirator, fighting wanting to tug it off.

“Penelope.” A slight warning tone had crept into Emily’s tone. Garcia visibly collected herself.

“Right. Victimology. Well, most offenders would avoid targeting law enforcement, so I figured the unsub picked you out for a reason. I focused on those characteristics which separate you from everyone else.”

“You have no idea just how many multi-disciplinary experts there are out there,” interjected Alvez.

“Newbie speaks the truth. For once. There were, I mean, like, _thousands._”

“Although only a handful had your level of field experience, Reid,” Alvez continued smoothly.

“But that shouldn’t have surprised you at all.” Reid was honestly confused. “After all, the definition of multi-disciplinary expert is incredibly imprecise. Even if you eliminate anyone who isn’t a genius, which statistically is 2% of the population, you’re still looking at-”

“Too many people. We know,” Rossi hastily interrupted. “And whilst that didn’t help us at the time, given what we now know…”

“You think I was picked because, as a profiler, I’d be a challenge?”

“No, kiddo.”

“We think the unsub wanted an academically gifted behavioral psychologist, Spencer. One with few family ties but with experience of surviving long-term incarceration.”

Reid was still staring wide-eyed at Emily when she thanked Garcia and moved them on again. “I've been looking at how Spencer might have been abducted. Since JJ was working on his return, we’ve-”

“Just a second,” Tara interjected. “Doctor Reid, could you step out?”

He turned to look at her. “You’re kidding me.” She clearly wasn’t. “Why would I step out? I’ve a right to hear this.” He glanced at the assembled faces for support and found none. “Am I… am I going to be let back in?”

“Probably not,” Tara said. “Honest question: would you prefer us to finish up back at the BAU?”

The childish part of him wanted to throw them all out for rejecting him. But the larger, needier feeling was that he didn’t want to be alone in the building, abandoned to a room which he was increasingly realizing resembled the Cell. He could see it in all its barren glory through the one-way mirror. Gracelessly muttering, “Stay if you want,” he stood and exited, only just stopping himself from slamming the door. Entering his room, he cast off his respirator and stomped into his make-believe forest.

**Secure unit, Quantico  
** **15:35 that day**

“We’re going to set a guard.”

Spencer looked up and around the room. Where had Emily’s voice just come from? She hadn’t… Had she just _loudspeakered _him? He strode to the mirror. “Hold that thought,” he told it. Pulling the respirator over his face, he yanked the door open and marched back into the conference room. “Say that again,” he demanded.

“Cool it, Reid,” Alvez murmured. “We’re not the bad guys here.”

“You’ve just tried to talk to me via a loudspeaker when I’m _right next door_,” he disagreed. “I’m sorry if this,” And he pointed at the mask over his face, “Is making you feel awkward. But I still need you to treat me like a human and not a victim or a… a…” He ran out of steam suddenly and finished lamely. “Or a prisoner. Please,” he added.

There was a contrite silence, broken when Rossi stood and pulled out the spare chair. “Take a seat, Agent Reid,” he said. “I think I speak for everyone by saying we apologize.” There were murmurs of agreement around the table. Spencer put a little bit of his forest by the chair and took his place.

“I’m so sorry, Reid,” Emily began. “Let me try this again.” She coughed and gravely announced, “We’re ready to deliver the profile.”

Reid’s lips quirked despite himself. “You’re going to deliver it to _me_?!”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Uh, okay.” He settled himself into his chair a bit more. “I guess I’m ready?”

“We’re looking for a male or female in their mid to late 40s,” Emily began. “This person is well-educated, organized and very likely single - divorced or widowed.”

Tara spoke next. “They have access to a secure plot of land. Remote enough that frequent visits do not arouse suspicion yet within a short commute of a major center - think major enough to have a university campus.”

“We believe this individual is connected to the academic research community,” JJ smoothly continued. “And specializes in behavioral psychology. From the precision of the conditioning you were subjected to, our focus is on senior researchers, laboratory assistants…people familiar with the discipline needed to run an extended experiment.”

“This unsub didn’t get the recognition they felt they deserved, or they suffered a professional rejection around a year to 18 months ago. Your abduction, reprogramming, and the academic paper were all an attempt to rectify that.” Rossi paused and waved his hands in a short display of Italian showmanship. “Look at me; I was right.”

Alvez picked up the profile again. “This person was compelled to prove their theory even though they wouldn’t be able to take the credit.”

“It will be a surprise to the unsub’s colleagues when we find him or her,” JJ added. “This individual is adept at hiding in plain sight and has maintained a professional exterior while damn well _torturing_ you over-” She stopped and twisted her lips to regain an emotional equilibrium. “Sorry. I just…”

Emily gave JJ a compassionate glance, then clasped her hands and leaned forward. “Remind you of anyone?”

Spencer thought and slumped. “Yes. Practically every academic I know.”

Emily sat back, dejected, exchanging a look with Alvez. “We figured as much,” he said. “We’d like to increase your security by setting a guard.”

“We think that there’s a risk the unsub may use their status to try and self-insert into the investigation,” Emily added.

“What?” Spencer looked around the table, finding only serious faces looking back at him.

“We don’t think you’re a re-abduction risk: the unsub has already succeeded in molding you into their desired product. But we believe the desire for recognition will compel them to try to get involved. And they’ll want to witness your deprogramming… we already know we’re going to need to push some boundaries to get past your subliminal conditioning.”

“You think the unsub might have access within _Quantico_?” He watched JJ carefully as he added, “Is this a conclusion from your discussion about how I was abducted?”

JJ held his gaze without flinching. “We don’t know how you were abducted, Spence.”

He gave up fishing. He never should have told her about that tell.


	7. Air

**Secure Unit, Quantico  
** **07:30 Next morning**

“Good morning, Doctor Reid!” Tara called from outside the room. “I’ve picked up bagels for breakfast. Cream cheese suit you?”

He made a vague sound of assent as he rolled stiffly onto his side preparatory to sitting. Grimacing, it occurred to him that maybe it might be time to ask for some bedding.

“Here,” his door cracked open and Tara appeared holding a cup emblazoned with a coffee shop logo. “Special treat.”

He was drenched in sweat, heart beating a million miles an hour, respiration ragged. Although he was still lying on the floor, the light had shifted. Hair was stuck to his forehead; he tried to bring his hand up to brush it back but moving his arms didn’t really work. His wrist thunked to the floor and he found himself gasping. Which was odd, because he could feel an oxygen mask on his face.

Confused, he tried to raise his head, cracking his eyes open. Pressure was applied to his forehead keeping it in place and he blinked against gummy gloop rendering his vision blurry. A shape leant over him, very close, and he kicked and jerked to try to get away from it.

“Stay still,” a stranger’s voice said, and cursed him.

He tried to raise his head again and felt the same resistance. A hand reached out for his face and settled the oxygen mask more firmly. What was going on?

Hurried footsteps, something being placed on the floor next to him, another blur of movement overhead and material wrapping around his bicep, tight. “What’ve we got?”

“A fucking lunatic,” the first voice said. “Like a crazed ox trampling around in here.”

Was that… That was _him_ they were talking about?

A hand peeled back an eyelid and shone a bright light in his eye. He cried out against it, wondering when he’d even shut his eyes. Pain began to register - his back, right shoulder, both knees… even his _fingernails_.

What was going on? Who were these people? Where did Tara go?

Tara.

She should be here. He’d lost time. Something was badly wrong.

“Whuh…” But his mouth wouldn’t work properly either, and he was choking. Sure hands wrapped around his torso and rolled him to his side. A hand reached for the mask on his face.

Footsteps pounded, approaching fast. Alvez’s urgent command came from the doorway: “_No_!”

“What?” The hands stopped. Spencer, frantic to breathe, thrashed to free himself.

“The mask. Leave it.”

Even while gagging and ineffectually wheezing for breath, even while feeling the pull of the Cell as his brain took its familiar plunge towards nothing, Spencer could hear the confusion and dismay that request bought to those around him.

In one last gasp before oblivion, one sentence came through clearly. “Because,” he heard Luke say, anguish lending his voice a sharp edge, “If you take it off, there’s every chance he’d kill you to get out of here.”

**Later**

It was pitch black, so he couldn’t really see Tara’s black eye. He could imagine it though. _Sorry,_ he apologized. Careful of her splinted arm, she shrugged, or at least, he imagined she did.

“Did you know,” he told her, “That rats in a box will run around frantically when you put an electric current in the floor? It was one of the original Skinner Box experiments. While they were running around, the rats would accidentally hit a lever, turn off the current, and then - each time they got electrocuted - they would manage to hit the lever just that little bit quicker. Eventually, the rats switched it the moment they were put in the box.”

“I’ve studied psychology, Doctor Reid,” Tara replied dryly. “Funnily enough, I _did_ know that.”

He liked that he conjured snarky hallucinations, but he also liked that he could ignore them. “The thing is,” he continued his lecture, “It turns out that if you put a human into a Skinner Box, you can get just the same effect by pumping smoke in. There isn’t a way out, you see.”

“Oh, Reid,” Tara said, and she sounded impossibly sympathetic.

“So there’s no light and no air and no way out. And after the first moment of panic, you think ‘the unsub’s given me a way to survive this’, and you blunder about, choking in the dark, to find it. But you don’t. Find it, I mean. And then you forget why you are blundering, and you just want to get out and you can’t. And you…” He took a shuddering breath. “I don’t know why the unsub didn’t... doesn’t put the lever in all the time. Sometimes it’s there and sometimes it isn’t.” He knocked his head back against the wall. “What happened just now?”

Tara sighed. “You caught the smell of cigarette smoke off my clothes. I was outside Starbucks. I thought I was far enough away from… well, I’m sorry.”

“Right.” His hands pulled at strands of carpet, questing for the mesh. “I’m Doctor Spencer Reid,” he recited to himself. “I went missing in August.”

“Okay,” she agreed softly. Footsteps crossed to him and a hand rustled his hair. “We’ll give you a moment then.” The footsteps retreated and he heard a door open. “But Reid,” she told him from the exit, “Remember that you only need to open your eyes to come back this time.”

**The Cell  
** **About 6 days in, months earlier**

The chimes sounded and obediently he crawled to the shelves, found and pressed the button, opened the panel, drank the water and retreated back to the solid presence of the container wall - pressing himself into it as if to convince himself that both he and it still had substance in this sightless, soundless void. A sob of despair came out of nowhere, startling him; he buried his face in his hands to hide it from the unsub. Flashes of non-existent light sparked against his eyeballs. Spencer, shaking, ignored them and purposefully, carefully, constructed Shenandoah forest and retreated from his surroundings.

“Naughty,” scolded Emily as she met him on the Overall Falls trail path. “You know to avoid crawling, Spencer.”

He wrapped his arms around himself to hide his shakes. A fly buzzed his face and he jerked from it. “Yeah, I know,” he agreed softly. It was important after all to keep the distinction between rat and human. He sighed and added sound to his fabrication - a woodpecker tapping a tree far off to their right, a raven cawing high overhead. Emily looked up to try to locate it.

“You know, I can’t work out why,” he brooded once the shakes had died away and they started walking. “I mean obviously, if we assume the similarities to Pavlov’s original experiment are deliberate, then it would follow that the unsub wants to see if I can be trained to, to, erm…”

“Salivate when you hear a ring tone?” Emily delivered the question without so much as a flinch. 

“Right.” His mouth twisted. “And that’s what I don’t understand. This” - he waved his hands to indicate the shipping container hidden in the undergrowth - “is sophisticated. The chime is not. I’m missing something which explains the inconsistency: why would I learn to salivate to a ring tone if there’s no olfactory stimulus to trigger an initial salivation response?” Emily looked confused so he elaborated. “Pavlov’s dogs started off salivating at the smell of food; it was only later that changed to the bell.” He indicated himself. “Definitely not drooling here.” 

“Huh.” Emily frowned as they walked, mulling over the contradiction. Eventually her face cleared. “Maybe the ring tone is a coincidence or an in-joke of some kind?”

He turned to her, a questioning eyebrow raised.

“What if this was about Skinner and not Pavlov? Then it wouldn’t be about conditioning you to a secondary stimulus…”

“It’s be about the unsub wanting me to unthinkingly press buttons when I hear a ring tone.” Spencer pondered this as the path took them up a scraggy hillside. “Ok, I guess that makes sense,” he eventually decided. He glumly scuffled at pine needles littering the path. “I profiled the unsub as a behavioral specialist. I, uh, I think they might actually know how to do this. Change my behavior, I mean.”

Emily frowned. “You would need to be very sure of your abilities to attempt operant conditioning on a behavioral analyst.”

He bit back a bitter laugh. “Look… look around you! I’m buried in an isolation chamber fitted out with an electrified floor and computer-controlled pass-throughs.” For a moment the forest faded to an oppressive, dark silence. He swallowed and reconstructed his refuge. “This unsub _is_ highly self-confident.” The heel of one hand rubbed into his left eye. “I’m never getting out of here, am I?”

Emily caught his arm to turn him towards her, a sympathetic look on her face; after a moment’s thought, she started to pet him. He watched her do so, neither stopping her nor relaxing into the offered touch.

“I think the unsub wants to bend me to their will precisely _because_ I know what’s going on,” he ventured, just at the point her attempted comfort became awkward. “It’s a challenge to them.”

Emily withdrew her hand. “They think eventually you won’t be able to resist.”

“They might have a point.”

“Regardless, you need to keep sane,” she countered. “No more crawling. We’re coming for you, Spencer. I know it’s taking time, but you’ve got to make sure you’re here to save.”

He kicked a stone from the dirt track into the undergrowth, the _you should hurry then_, remaining unsaid.

“How long’s it been now?” she asked.

I’ve heard the unsub five times, he thought. And each time is probably 24 hours apart, although I can’t be sure because some of the time in here I’m unconscious. Plus, studies have shown I can expect my sense of time to start to drift. So, no less than 120 hours, no more than 168.

He kicked another stone. “Nearly a week,” he told her.

They walked in silence a way, skirting around the edge of a small lagoon.

“How long will it... will it take?”

He looked across at her. She was biting her lip, something he hadn’t seen her do since she became Unit Chief, and he mentally chastised himself for conjuring an inaccurate representation. “Fine,” she snapped, releasing her lip, a frustrated frown instead coming over her features. She stopped walking and he could tell she was glaring at his back. “Tell me how long this is going to take, Doctor.”

“I don’t know,” he threw over his shoulder, and she hurried again to catch him up. “There’s very little published research on behavioral conditioning during prolonged sensory deprivation, probably due to the ethical constraints. Technically, this is cutting edge research.” Which, of course, didn’t make it admirable. “And my ability to counter this - at least in the short term - is definitely a novel variable.”

“You can counter this?” Emily sounded appropriately surprised.

They walked while he considered her question, sweating in the late summer heat. He was mostly managing to cope with the sensory deprivation, the elaborately imagined forest providing both mental stimulation and a construct for him to work out his thoughts with his ‘team’. The conditioning was another matter: he’d set off for the water just now without even stopping to consider it, at only the third time of its presentation. Too early in the process for it to be a conditioned response, but he would have to be careful. While he needed water to survive, eventually, unless he did something about it, it _would_ become a conditioned response. He was going to need to take steps to resist - without inadvertently compromising his survival. 

“Actually, I don’t know,” he finally answered. And found himself alone. He turned a slow 360, eyes dancing through the patches of light and shade etched by branches above him. Emily had left him. He posted a rueful goodbye to her up into the sky. “But I do promise I’ll keep trying.”

**Secure Unit, Quantico  
** **Later**

They put in additional protocols. 

In his cell-room type thing, he’d smashed his forehead and mouth falling (repeatedly) over the furniture, so the chairs and single table were removed. The clock had bounced from the wall and cracked; Emily - the real one - promised him a replacement. The one-way mirror had been cleaned of his smeared blood and could now reflect his new bandages and scrapes in all their glory. The cleaning effort on the walls hadn’t gone so well: scratches, cracks and dents showed where he’d tried to tear his way out. His door now locked from the outside; no one knew why he hadn’t tried it, but equally no one wanted to take the chance for the future. Spencer very much wanted to argue this point, but Tara’s injuries and his team’s serious countenance dissuaded him.

They set up a room at the back as a decontamination area. Anyone entering the unit now came in via a different door, showered, changed into scrubs and left personal belongings in a locker. The only good news was that they were going to step up the effort to identify all his triggers.

Spencer stood in the center of the small, empty space, clenching and unclenching his right fist, his left hand digging into his right arm and his gaze fixed on the control panel by his locked door. He wanted to go across and flick the switches and he was turning in mental circles wondering if it was a bad idea if he did so. This room wasn’t a Skinner Box. Realistically, he knew that he just wanted to check he was still the one in charge of the light and heat in this room. But if he started flicking switches, did that lead inexorably to pressing levers and stepping on pedals and typing on keypads again? And worse, what if the dimmed lights didn’t change brightness, or the heat stayed constant?

He didn’t know how long he stood there cogitating indecisively, but eventually he retreated to the wall and lay down with his back to the mirror.

A short while later, the lights went out.


	8. Food

**Secure unit, Quantico  
** **Next morning **

“You ready, Reid?” came the voice over the speaker. “Oh, wait, wait… I nearly forgot. Tara provided notes.” There was a brief pause. Spencer used the time to contemplate the newly arrived objects in his room: a rack of small plastic aerosol bottles, a protein bar and a short section of metal duct. It wasn’t too hard to determine which trigger they were about to investigate. “Umm… ok. I’m SSA Luke Alvez, and today we find ourselves in sunny-”

“Quantico,” Spencer finished for him. “I know where I am, Luke. I’m me.”

“Okay, that’s… that’s great. So, I guess start with magic potion number 1 then. In your own time.”

Spencer resisted giving the mirror an eye roll and instead reached for the first bottle. It was labelled with a clear ‘1’, which he showed to his observer, liquid sloshing inside, before moving to stand underneath the ventilation. He extended his arm as far as possible, aimed at the ceiling, and, turning his head away, hesitantly pressed the aerosol mechanism. A hiss sounded as vapor escaped.

For a moment, nothing happened. “Don’t forget to breathe, Reid,” Alvez advised.

Right. Spencer gave a rueful smile at his hidden colleague and sniffed. “It smells like a gas station,” he reported. “But I’m not feeling anything. No compulsions from this one.”

“That’s a ‘No’ for number 1 then. Give it a moment to dissipate. And you’re right, it was gasoline.”

Spencer raised his eyebrows: volatile gases weren’t what he’d have chosen to pump into an underground chamber, even in trace quantities. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels trying to guess what might come next.

“Room is clear; try number 2.”

“Okay.” Reid switched bottle 1 for bottle 2. This time the contents didn’t so much slosh as rustle. Even while he showed the label to Alvez and stood under the vent he was trying to work out what could possibly link gasoline and a dry solid. Extending his arm, he pressed the aerosol and again inhaled.

“Whoa,” he muttered after a moment.

“‘_Whoa_’?”

“I don’t know exactly. I can’t smell anything, but I’m definitely _thinking_ food more than I was before. I’m not feeling a need to crawl through this though.” He kicked the metal trunking at his feet resulting in a satisfying, hollow _clang_.

“And are you, umm, you?”

Reid cocked his head and considered. “Yeah, I don’t think I lost any time. Did I?”

“Not as far as I saw.” Alvez fell silent with a sigh leaving Spencer wondering what the substance might be. But then he spoke again. “You’re not going to like this.”

“I’m not _liking_ anything about this, Luke.” He squinted at the substance in the bottle. “What is it?”

“Tetrapalladium dinitride. Or, as it’s more commonly known, TPD.” Spencer’s hand shook, and he gingerly replaced the bottle in the rack. “Actually, more specifically in this case, a synthetic scent training aid. Look, gimme a sec.” Moments later, Alvez appeared at the door and accepted the rack of bottles carefully handed to him. “Any ideas why you didn’t flip out on that one?” he asked.

“Umm…” With an effort, Spencer tore his mind away from spinning on the fact he could now detect trace scents of explosives. “I’d say it’s most likely down to the time delay between stimulus and reinforcement. Immediacy has a bearing on the effectiveness of conditioning. It always took me a while to get to the food in the Cell.” He gave a self-depreciating shrug, hoping Alvez would drop the subject.

Alvez, clearly disquieted, didn’t oblige. “Christ, Reid. What you went through…”

“Yeah.” A nervous laugh escaped. “Luke, just… just how screwed am I?” Their gaze fell on the rack of bottles. Spencer swallowed. “Every time I think it can’t get worse, it somehow does.” 

Luke grimaced. “I’m sorry, man. Look-” He started to fidget, obviously casting about for something positive to say. “You know we’ll help you through this, right? This team… that’s, uh, that’s what we do for each other.”

“Yeah. I know.” Spencer spoke softly, then ducked his head. “You know you were there? All of you. While I was in there.”

“Yeah?” Luke nodded, almost managing to hide his discomfort. “That’s… that’s good, Reid. And we’ll stick with you now too.”

Spencer smiled with gratitude, not raising his eyes from the floor. He spotted the protein bar, considered it, reached to pick it up and took a bite. “What?” he asked at Luke’s raised eyebrow when he’d finished chewing. “I’m just hungry. This is breakfast.”

**The Cell  
** **Months earlier**

A buzz sounded in a new panel while he waited by the shelves for the Push button to light up. Immediately curious in the face of something which was different to his current state of utter boredom, he opened the cover.

Light.

A faint, but definite, glow illuminated the far end of the metal duct he found behind the cover. _Come hither_, it beckoned, pulsing eerily. The bottom of the entrance was level with his hips, the top with his chest, the width slightly more than his shoulders: it was sized for him, if he crawled. With a quick apology to Emily, Spencer wasted little time in bringing a knee up to the edge of the metal, ducking inside and hoisting himself into the space - the cell floor had proved to be very unforgiving of any delay in carrying out tasks up to now. Besides, it was something _other_ than the oppressive, black silence which was gradually weaving itself into his very skin.

Once he was in, the cover flapped down and sealed with a determined, magnetic click. Spencer pushed back at it with his feet, dismayed but not surprised to find it wouldn’t move. Still, he fitted nicely into the crawl space with enough room around him to lurch forward in a comfortable crawl. Since moving onward appeared to be the only possible direction, he did so, covering the short distance to the wavering glow with relative ease, each movement accompanied by the unmusical twang and boom of hollow metal around him.

At the end of the space he twisted onto his back to examine the source of the light. Above him, behind a clear glass panel, a digital clock counted upwards. 0:00:47 it said, clicking through 0:00:48 and 0:00:49 while he watched. Even better, it came with a bar of food laid out on a pressure pad.

Take the food, stop the clock, Spencer assumed. Then what?

Still, he was starving: it had been _days_. He reached up his hand…

…and bashed it against the unmoving glass panel.

Dammit. He tried again, harder. Then harder still.

It took until 0:07:46 before he admitted defeat and lashed out at the duct-work in frustration. It clunked hollowly back at him, mocking his lack of progress while the clock above him ticked steadily on.

Wait.

_What _was the clock timing? Not a countdown: it was counting up, not down. So, this wasn’t about torturing him with unobtainable food. This was about recording the time it took for him to _reach_ the food. The food on display. The food being shown as a goal while he tried to reach it…

Oh, no. He knew which behavioral experiment involved timing how long it took to retrieve food.

He pushed at all the panels within reach. To the left of his head metal gave way, swinging back on a hinge at the top. It revealed nothing but darkness beyond, and Spencer could bet anything that once he pushed himself through it, it would close behind him and not open again.

He was at the entrance to a maze.

More to the point, he was about to be the rat in it.

In his 6’ x 8’ x 8’6” cell, it was pitch dark, chilly and silent. Here, surrounded by trunking, the dark and chill remained but he was swamped with sound. His respiration, harsh with claustrophobic edge, bounced back off the metal sides. Where his body made contact, metal dinged and flexed, rippling the sound back and forth through the maze as the entire place seemed to bend and stretch to accommodate him. Each placement of his hands or knees came with a din of impact.

As anticipated, after he’d wriggled through the flap and got back onto his hands and knees, the flap had swung closed behind him and latched shut. He’d crawled forward a foot or so, and abruptly found his hand placing itself onto nothing. Careful feeling of the space in front of him revealed a stubby shaft with 3 exits one above each other: he scooted around and dropped down to stand upright in the shaft. Now he could continue on the same level, go down, or go up.

He crouched and went downwards. A gentle slope deposited him onto a different surface: still metal, but no longer smooth. In fact... he tapped his fingers experimentally against the floor. The resultant muffled clunk quickly fell off. He swept his hands out to the sides and came across wavy metal. _Tap_, dull clunk. _Tap_, dull clunk.

Okay, this maze was inside another buried shipping container. Well, geographic profiling was his specialty. Now he had bounds for this labyrinth.

He had to retreat up the ramp when he realized the space was a dead end. Once more standing in the shaft, he hooted into each of the remaining two openings, testing whether the echo might tell him which was the longer passage. The sounds rolled around him. You’re trapped, the hoots gloated. Buried underground, slowly asphyxiating and the sides are getting closer…

Nonsense, he told himself firmly, and wriggled into the middle passage. Only his back hit the top as he moved forward, then his shoulder jammed forcing him to twist to his side slightly. A moment later he told himself to take a steadying breath. Okay, so this particular passage _was_ getting smaller. He’d had plenty of space to begin with, this would be fine. The unsub presumably wanted him to succeed: after all, if he didn’t finish, he couldn’t repeat the exercise later for behavioral conditioning.

A u-shaped bend provided an interesting contortionist puzzle to work through. By the time he’d managed to get past it, he was panting harshly, lying on his back, sweat prickling at his skin. He gave himself a moment to recover then reached forward with his hands to find out what lay ahead.

Metal duct-work above, around and below. Dammit. A dead end.

He wriggled himself out and pulled himself into the topmost exit from the shaft. A sharp turn to the right, and then he found himself pushing at a second hinged flap followed by a gentle slide downwards. Oh, he thought, Section One complete.

Painstakingly careful exploration revealed Section Two to be a vertical cylindrical space set on the base of the shipping container, its sides lined with ladders and passages. Not including the entrance passage, 15 exits branched out at different heights. He decided to pick the one at ceiling height first. After a moment, the passage pitched down sharply and he slid headfirst, hands and feet pressing firmly against the sides to brake. The slide ended, and he had a heart-stopping moment of free-fall before colliding with the floor. He sat up, rubbing his forehead, and felt for the sides. Back in the cylinder.

He changed his plan and restarted from the bottom. The first passage offered him left or right options; he picked right and followed the passage as it curved around doughnut-like to bring him back to the start. The next gave him an internal ladder which he dutifully climbed and popped out midway up the cylinder. The next was a dead end. The next the base of the slide he’d fallen down.

Nine more to go. Six took him to seven via a tiny, bending passage. Eight initially seemed to be a dead end but proved to have one of those one-way flaps when he approached it from the other direction in passage nine. Ten got narrower and narrower and Spencer only reversed out with difficulty when he decided it really was impassible. Okay, so, it _would_ be possible to trap himself in here. Careful. Careful.

Eleven was another doughnut with two exits to the central space. So that took care of twelve and unlucky thirteen too.

Fourteen was another slide. He was six feet up now and he knew this one didn’t exit below: he decided to take the passage feet first. As he rapidly slid downwards, his feet hit a panel which smoothly gave way and latched behind him once his head had passed it. Section Two complete.

At the bottom, he realized he was in trouble. The space he was in was narrow and shallow (_not_ coffin shaped, just don’t go there), he was feet first and his toes were telling him the way forward was directly up. The latched panel was immediately behind his head so there was no possibility of turning himself around. He closed his eyes against the dark.

“Please help,” he begged, “I think I’m stuck.”

He hadn’t really expected help, and he didn’t get it. He lay on the flexing metal, feeling his breath bounce back at him off the nearby metal panel.

Calm, calm. Competent FBI Agent here. Feet first upwards it would have to be.

He rolled awkwardly onto his front and kicked his feet into the air. He felt for the way ahead with his toes and it was more of ‘up’. Okay. He used his hands to push himself further back and wriggled his hips uncomfortably into the air.

Still up.

His stomach was off the ground, his hips upright, his feet flailing unsupported above him, bashing against the sides. Still he had to go up.

He pushed and slid again, until he was straight upside down, hands either side of his head, blood pounding through his brain. Still up: he could cry. He extended his hands, pushing upwards, feet kicking for a way out.

Up.

He was expected to crawl up this, torso and extremities bracing his weight as he inched upwards. And he was going to have to do this upside down or die in here.

He lowered himself so his head was on the ground again, bent his knees, bent his feet, thrust his toes against the metal, jammed his back against the side and prayed. One hand off the floor and reaching for the sides, then the other.

He pushed upwards with his arms.

His head came off the ground.

His arm wobbled in surprise and dropped him back onto his head.

He gave himself a speedy pep talk: this task could be done, but with blood rushing to his head, it wasn’t going to get easier if he waited. He pushed upwards again, steadied himself and jammed his shoulder and hands to take his full weight. His stance held so he shuffled one leg followed by the other slightly up and again jammed himself against the tube. Eased up one hand and then the other a short way. Jammed his shoulder and hands again. Eased, jammed. Eased, jammed. Again. Again.

Again.

He could hear the sweat dripping from his hair plink off the metal below by the time his feet hit a gap. He fully braced his trembling muscles and felt cautiously with one foot extended. He was towards the top of the container: nearly eight foot in the air. The gap was low, but it extended around the entire top of the tube he was in. Once he got himself over the lip, he’d be able to re-orientate.

He took a moment to consider. The 360° lip meant that he’d lose the surface to brace his legs against. He’d need to scrunch up as much as possible below and then push his body over it in one movement, getting enough of himself across to flip his center of gravity away from the tube. No second chances: an eight-foot, head-first fall would break his neck.

He got himself in position, breathed deeply and _pushed_.

When he had recovered - which meant the blood had stopped roaring in his ears, his entire body was no longer trembling, and the sweat had mostly evaporated - he reached out to feel his way. He found the latched panel with his feet, so rotated himself through half a turn to face it. The space wasn’t high enough to crawl, so he sort of slithered through.

Although it wasn’t light, his peripheral vision could sense form around him in the next section. It gave Spencer hope that maybe this particular trial was nearing its end. He calculated how much of the shipping container the maze he’d already encountered might have taken up. It matched: the unsub was running out of space in which to lay devious traps.

That didn’t mean this last section was going to be easy. The duct had narrowed yet again: he could feel it pressing against his shoulders and hips when he wriggled onwards. Turning even from his front to his back was going to take effort.

He reached his hands forward and found only one direction of travel: a very sharp turn to the right, taking him almost back on himself. He heaved his upper body around the bend, twisting onto his side with the aid of much kicking of feet and swearing. Once he’d managed it and was bent double, he felt for the next direction with some misgivings, half expecting to find an impossible twist back on himself in the other direction. He was pleasantly surprised to find himself instead faced with a ladder down.

At least, he was pleasantly surprised for the nanosecond it took his brain to realize he was going down a ladder from eight feet up headfirst. He allowed himself a moment of despair, head in hands and tears not quite at bay. No one to see this insane battle for relative freedom after all. Then he mustered all courage, kicked and twisted and wriggled himself forward again and stuck his head down into the near darkness, one hand firmly wrapped around a rung and the other feeling about for other holds or surfaces.

The other hand didn’t find anything. Spencer wriggled a little further, perilously balanced at the edge, one hand on the ladder, his hips over the edge of the gap, his feet firmly pressed against the narrow trunking preventing his body slipping any further downward.

His free hand was still finding nothing but space. Spencer frowned, eased himself a little further in… and slipped.

His handhold caught his plummet with a wrench. He cried out, even while his body swung upright in a floppy cartwheel as he fell through the gap. For a moment he hung, single handed, from the too-short ladder, then - before he could reach up with his free hand - his grip gave way and he fell again into the gloom.

He landed in a crumple on the ground after a short fall. Gasping, he checked for injuries. Wrist, sore but able to flex. Ankles, sore but the same. Any bones broken? No, amazingly. He sat back, ran his fingers through his hair and pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. For a moment he seriously considered whether he would be better off just sitting here in the gloom awaiting rescue.

“You’re better than that, Spencer,” Emily said, quite clearly, from close by.

Spencer flinched in shock, swinging his head towards her and peering uselessly into the shadows. Reaching out just resulted in bashing metal. “Emily?” he called, a slight break to his voice. “Oh god. Are you there?”

Rationally, he knew there would only be silence in return. He’d half expected this at some point. There was plenty of research to point to auditory hallucinations being a common side product of stress and isolation. But right now, he didn’t want to be rational. He wanted the solace a friend could bring.

“Emily? _Please_.”

It took him a long time to move from that spot, but eventually he got to wobbly feet to begin his search for the way out. It wasn’t difficult to find - he could see that shapes were slightly more defined in the far corner of the space he was in. He felt his way across and found the exit passage at knee height. It had an eerie, pulsing glow so Spencer wasn’t surprised when he ducked his head down to finally see the clock ticking through hours, minutes and seconds, a bar of food on a pressure plate almost within reach. He knelt, eased himself in headfirst and wriggled along a bit.

The food was there, the clock was counting. Spencer took a deep breath, and picked the bar up.

The clock stopped instantly, defining his long hours spent in the maze. Just when Spencer was starting to wonder whether it was safe to take a bite of his reward, he heard the clicks of magnets disengaging. In one smooth movement, the duct he was in tilted downward and he slid gently back into the cell, a protein bar firmly gripped in his hand.

**Secure unit, Quantico  
** **A short while later**

“Of course, in the original experiment,” Spencer said, in between mouthfuls of cereal, “The timing was used to measure the degree to which the rats were becoming conditioned by seeking out the reward at the end. If they reached the food quicker than before, then it was assumed they were modifying their behavior to do so.”

“But your eidetic memory meant...?”

Spencer nodded, pleased to be asked the question. “It meant that once I’d successfully navigated the maze, it was easy to do so again. Plus, I could orientate myself the right way. So, it actually just came down to the physical speed I could get myself through the twists and turns.” He waved at the space where the ventilation duct had been before Alvez cleared it away. “I got to the timer in 2 hours, 38 minutes, 14 seconds that first time.”

“And the second?”

Spencer laughed, but it was bitter. “When I went in, the display wasn’t a timer anyone. It was a countdown. I had 2 hours 33 minutes on the clock; I did it in 16 minutes and 43 seconds. Stupid. I should have realized. The next time I had 11 minutes.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. 5 minutes extra time next try if I didn’t get to the food in time, 5 minutes less if I did. Basically, I got to eat every other go in there.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tetrapalladium dinitride is made up. Sorry to anyone with a passing knowledge of chemistry for any mangled valencies or unlikely properties.


	9. Sleep

**Secure Unit, Quantico  
** **10:00 Same day**

The tray on the floor was stacked high with small plastic containers. He reached to pick it up, and did a sort of combined lift of the tray and duck down of his head to peer inside the boxes. A segment or neat cube of chopped fruit lay inside each one.

He had not a clue what this was going to mean for him.

Garcia watched him from the door. She was nervous, wringing her hands, shuffling her weight from foot to foot, hesitating to cross the threshold. Spencer shared her anxiety; if the tech analyst wasn’t sure she was capable of handling whatever this was, then perhaps they might both be better off getting a different team member. “This might take a while,” she blurted. “All we’ve got to go on is ‘fruit’.”

He nodded thoughtfully. All they had to go on was ‘fruit’, so here, neatly prepared, were 52 different types of fruit. They looked delicious. “Can I eat them?” he asked.

“Oh! I, ah…” Garcia’s expression went through a complicated range of emotions: surprise, bemusement, consternation then pity all chased across her face. “We thought… That is…” She was compulsively twisting her bangles now, the answer obvious by her reluctance to say it.

“Ok,” he said. “I guess not.” He set the tray down.

“Oh! Oh no, honey,” she gasped, and stepped inside his room, arms outstretched, before suddenly recollecting herself and jerking back. “Oh!”

“They’ve still got you on a plain food diet, Spencer,” Emily observed drily from where she was leaning against the wall. She pushed herself upright and sauntered over to examine the tray. “That much variety? It’d make you sick.”

He twisted his lips, reluctantly accepting that he wasn’t yet up to handling all the sensations. “It’s ok, Garcia,” he reassured.

“It’s not.” She looked tearful. “It’s not. This is so, so… _horrid_. And unfair. And, you know what? When this is over, and you are _you_ again, we are so going to have a fruit party. With cherries, and apples, and star fruit, and pineapples, and, and, _oranges_.”

He laughed despite himself. “That means a lot, Garcia, thank you. Although in all probability, JJ will expand my diet to fruit before too long: she’ll want me to have the vitamins. I can get A, C and fiber just from oranges. And did you know that bananas and avocados contain potassium?”

She gave him a weak smile. “Actually, for once, I did know the thing you just said.”

Huh. He thought a moment. “Ok, then. Did you know that a monkey peels a banana from the bottom rather than the top?” 

Garcia looked dubious. “Why… why would they do that?”

“It’s actually a highly efficient method. Typically, it results in recovery of an additional 2% of the fruit because they aren’t pinching off the top part by the stem.” For a moment, they grinned in shared enjoyment of the ridiculous fact. Then Emily gently coughed and reality crept back. He gestured to the tray. “Garcia, are… are you gonna be okay with this?”

She gulped. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

“Well,” he grimaced, wondering how best to reassure her. “I’m… y’know, probably not. This fruit is going to trigger me to do _something_ and” - He exchanged a look with ‘Emily’ - “well, anyway.” He instinctively held his hands out, palms facing Garcia. Unthreatening. “But I kinda want the person supporting me to be, well, _supportive_.”

Her mouth turned down and she sniffed back a sob. “I want that too.”

He thought a moment. “So, look, Prentiss wouldn’t have sent you if she thought you couldn’t do this.” Beside him, ‘Emily’ gave a snort. He ignored her. “You’re the kindest, most generous person I know, Penelope. You guide the team through things you find horrifying every day.” She gave an odd hiccupping sound, somehow mixing together agreement and a sob. “I trust you to support me here.” He hoped. “You can do this.”

She gulped and nodded, tears shimmering. 

“So, uh, what am I expecting to happen?” he asked. “What’s it going to trigger?”

“M- movement,” his colleague replied, dabbing her eyes and visibly rallying. “We think.” She took a deep breath. “And I. Have. _Got_. This.” Drawing herself up, she nodded at him and abruptly shut and locked the door.

He blinked at her abruptness. Ok. They were doing this then. He let his feet take him to the tray and sat down cross-legged, elbows resting on his knees. Emily briefly put a reassuring hand to his shoulder, and then sat down opposite him. They waited together for the instruction to start even while his whirring brain told him what awaited.

Garcia’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Emily said the scent was linked to a motion detector and… and, the floor somehow.”

He already knew. He reached out an unsteady hand, and lifted the lid on the cube of apple.

**The Cell  
** **Months earlier **

The shock came out of nowhere, catching him unawares as he sat on the mesh floor mentally reviewing the syllabus for his upcoming autumn lecture series. He leapt to his feet with a hoarse cry of fear, pain and surprise, eyes wide and roving the darkness for danger. His breath panted, filling the space with unfamiliarly heightened sound, the echo telling him quickly that he was still enclosed in the small cell.

The pain quickly faded, leaving him with a tingling butt and feet which curled up in objection to taking his weight. He lurched to the back of the Cell, balancing on the sides of his feet, and put one hand onto the wall to steady himself. That done, he was able to pull a foot up and run his fingers over his soles to check for damage. The first was a little warm, albeit that might have been his imagination, as was the other foot and his backside.

That check complete, he worked his way around the Cell, feeling for anything amiss and getting his breathing under control. The space was as empty of anything but him as always. He found himself in front of the shelves and leant against them on tiptoes, forehead touching the metal. He brought one hand up and lightly slapped it against one of the panels. The reverberation filled the space then died away to nothing.

“Please help,” he called. “Are you there? Something went wrong with the floor.”

There was no sense of anything other than a computer listening on the other side of the barrier, but Spencer found himself begging again. “_Please_.” He thumped his forehead lightly against the panel, once. The clang jarred his ears, his reflected breath flowed across his cheek, tears were gathering unshed in his closed eyes, and he was _still trapped_ _here_. A groan escaped him.

“Spencer.”

He spun on the spot, eyes once again whipping back and forth, breath coming shallow and fast. “Emily?” he gasped, and stood stock still, not knowing whether he was hoping for a reply.

The shock this time took him to his knees, a harsh shout of anger and pain escaping him. “Oh _god_,” he groaned, his voice coming from somewhere deep inside. The soles of his feet were ablaze, and he collapsed forward onto his stomach and rolled to his back before pulling one foot up and running a tentative finger across the flushed skin. It wasn’t broken, but there was no doubt of its heat: the shocks were much more severe than he’d so far experienced.

He ran his hands into his hair, rocking a little from side to side without even realizing. His brain bounced from fear of more shocks to come, to contemplation of how best to arrange his body to minimize damage, to wanting the comfort of ‘Emily’ back.

“Spencer.”

Emily won out. He rolled over to the side her voice had come from.

“Find out why this is happening.”

Why this was…?

Oh, right. Right. Skinner box. These shocks were punishment for something.

What? What was he being punished for?

He replayed the two shocks, mind running back. He’d been quietly sat at the rear of the Cell for the first, speaking by the shelves for the second. Different location, different posture, different level of sound for each. He didn’t know what was different. He didn’t _know. _“Please,” he whispered. “_Don’t_.”

This time the shock hit his forearm, hip and right leg. He wailed in pain and dismay, writhing on his front on the floor. Even while the tears of frustration built, his brain added the data: three shocks, roughly the same time apart.

Roughly? He began to count.

Perhaps this wasn’t punishment but negative reinforcement. Perhaps there was something he could do to stop the maybe-regular shocks. He pushed himself to wobbly hands and knees and crawled to the shelves. Once there, he played his hands backwards and forwards across the surfaces of the panels searching for one which would open. He had to talk himself into standing to reach for the higher ones, wary of once more allowing the soles of his feet to come into contact with the mesh.

He knew the timing between shocks wasn’t regular before he’d finished searching. Since that could be a deliberate scheduling choice on the part of the unsub, he kept going. But once he’d gone over the entire area of shelves twice without finding an open panel, and for good measure searched the rest of his Cell too, he finally concluded that this wasn’t randomly timed negative reinforcement he could turn off. It was punishment.

It was long enough since the last shock for Spencer to have recovered enough to be able to pace in thought - five steps one way, gentle orientating kick against the wall, five steps the other, gentle kick again. Whatever he was being punished for, it was a computer which was detecting it. Which meant a sensor. He’d already eliminated location, posture and volume. There was no light in here, so that was another suite of sensors eliminated. Infra-red, humidity, gas, touch… most of them wouldn’t have detected a change in all the time the shocks had been happening.

But the IR one could have.

He blindly looked across at the shelf. His body heat could be tracked. An IR sensor would be able to see variations in temperature across his body and over time. It would be able to detect when he moved.

He shuddered and took an involuntary step back.

Oh no.

He’d been motionless every time the shocks had happened.

Three hours later, and Spencer was working on an experiment of his own to determine the parameters of the computer’s subroutine. Which sounded bold and scientific, but the truth was he was very much not looking forward to the shocks he was going to have to endure while he probed the determinants. Still, three hours of pacing had allowed him to realize that keeping the shocks turned off this way was unsustainable: he was thirsty, tired and sore… and getting more so with each passing minute.

Pacing, however, was helping him think if only because it kept the shocks turned off. He’d decided to allow himself to engage with ‘Emily’, and his auditory hallucination was cooperating by every once in a while contributing a thought or two.

“Let’s assume,” he began, “That I wanted to design this punishment. What would I be trying to achieve?”

Movement in the subject, obviously. It could also lead to exhaustion and sleep deprivation if you wanted to take it that far. He contemplated. Did the unsub want to take it that far? Was conditioning him to move the end game here, or was it rapid onset of psychosis and paranoia through lack of sleep?

“What does the profile tell you?” Emily asked.

He huffed. The profile told him he was dealing with a computer, and what was the point of profiling _that_? But, okay, behind the computer was an unsub. An unsub who had created a maze it was possible to get trapped in, deep inside a sealed, buried container. Yeah, this unsub was knowledgeable and cruel enough to put him through sleep deprivation. “Worst case is,” he told Emily, “This could go on for days.” He paced some more. “Did you know?” he asked, “That the highest ongoing response rate in behavioral conditioning occurs when the reinforcement is randomized in some way?”

“Spencer?”

“The fact is,” he continued, blithely ignoring his subconscious, “That if you only occasionally get a reward when you press a button, you’ll keep pressing it for a long time to see if the reward comes. Contrast that with a situation where if you press a button you always get a reward. If one day the reward doesn’t come, you might press it again once or twice to check, but your behavior will extinguish pretty quickly.”

“Spencer! Do you really want to be telling the unsub this?”

“This unsub is a behavioral specialist,” he shot back. “Do you honestly think I’m telling them anything they don’t know already?”

Emily replied by sulking. Reid sighed and attempted to mollify her. “What I’m saying,” he offered, “Is that to really make my behavior stick, I would write the program so that it was active for a random period of time, and triggered the punishing reinforcement after a random period of stillness from me.”

Which meant he’d need to be still to test his hypotheses. He mused how best to minimize the current travelling through his heart, while keeping his body still enough to trigger a shock. In the end he decided to just stand still. If nothing else, falling to the ground would reset the timer.

He stood. A count of three later a shock raced through him. He pitched forward with a cry, arms outstretched as he crashed onto the floor.

“Owww,” Emily commiserated.

Spencer was too busy shuddering to reply. When he thought he could stand again, he staggered to his feet and hobbled backwards and forwards on sore feet.

“Don’t you need to stop?”

“I’m _trying_,” he snapped back. “Although oddly enough, I’m not particularly keen to do that again.”

Her challenge had been what he needed though. On his next lap, he stood still again. Three beats later, the shock hit, and he was flat on the floor again.

“Do you need to test that again to be sure that it’s three seconds?” 

Spencer shook his head in the dark. On this occasion, he felt it would be reasonable to take an experimental shortcut. What next? Test the sensitivity of the sensor he supposed. Could he get away with a twitch of his hand, or did he need to be moving about the Cell?

He stood, faced the shelf and waved blindly at it, rapidly at first but slowing over several minutes until he was only… just… moving.

_Blam_, and he was writhing again on the ground.

So, he’d need to move a little, once every three seconds, for some unknown time into the future.

He scooted himself into a seated position resting against the rear wall, waving at the shelves, and resolved to check whether the task was complete every hour or so.

“So, I think this is about conditioning rather than sleep deprivation,” Spencer declared once he’d recovered after the fifth hourly check. “Compared to keeping me awake by water immersion, this method is considerably more exhausting. Logically, the unsub would want to prolong the experience if the objective was to keep me awake.”

“What?”

“Experiments into sleep deprivation with mice involved placing them on a pedestal of some sort, surrounded by water. When the mouse fell asleep, the respiratory reflex of their face dipping into water startled them awake. The key point being, they were resting while they were awake. I’m moving so I won’t last as long.”

“Don’t be so defeatist.”

“It’s physics, Emily. I’m burning too much energy.” 

Six hours in, he was still alternating waving and pacing. And at hours seven and eight, although he was fighting fatigue to do so.

By the ninth hour, he realized that regular events, such as food, toilet breaks, even the unsub’s daily housekeeping visit, hadn’t happened on schedule.

After eleven hours, it became agonizing to wave no matter which arm or foot he used and how much support he offered it. He stood and staggered around the walls of the Cell, dragging one foot slowly in front of the other over and over again.

During the twelfth hour, he reversed the direction around the Cell he was travelling for the forty ninth time. Or was it… was it the fifty ninth?

“Did you remember to test the shock?”

“I…” Spencer put out his hand to orientate against the wall. He couldn’t see in the dark, but it felt like he was wavering. “Uh, ’m not sure. Maybe… no, no, I don’t think…”

“Spencer, you need to test the response, remember.”

“Oh.” He stopped, and 3 seconds later was on the floor, blinking back tears of pain. “Still going,” he gasped out and got to his hands and knees. He couldn’t face putting weight on his feet right now; he was sure Emily would forgive him a few minutes crawling.

He lost track of time sometime before the thirteenth hour. Some time later, after another shock, he became aware of dampness chafing his legs when he moved. He was already so miserable, the fact he’d just pissed himself sort of faded into the background…

“Spencer,” Emily coaxed. “You need to wake up.” He lifted his head, blinking disorientated against the blackness. Wasn’t he walking somewhere? Why was he on all fours with his head on the floor?

“Move, Spencer.”

Move. Right. He reached out a hand so she could help him up.

“No, Spencer. Move!”

He dropped his hand and furrowed his brow trying to work out what was happening. A moment later, his forehead touched the floor. He recoiled, blinking.

“Spencer! Move!”

He was surprised enough to jerk into movement; momentum kept him crawling until his head collided with the Cell wall.

“Turn, Spencer.”

He slowly shook his head, back and forth. At first, he was dislodging the effects of the bump, but then it morphed into a denial that this task needed him to move, and after a while more it might have been refusal. He put out an arm to tell Emily he was done, and the loss of support pitched him onto his side. He groaned and struggled to get his arm under himself again but only succeeded on flopping onto his back.

“Come on, Spencer!”

“… I…”

The shock arched his back, threw his legs out and tore a scream from him.

“Oh god, Spencer,” Emily gasped. “I’m here.” She rushed to kneel at his head and brushed his sweat-coated hair back from his forehead. “At least wave or something, goddammit.”

His hand twitched, but he was utterly spent. Another shock raced through him, arching his body again so his heels dug in and his jaw locked and it felt like all his weight was taken by his neck. His scream was hoarser this time, although he thought perhaps the shock had been milder.

“Okay. Okay, Spencer. I’ve got you. Breathe through it.”

He breathed. Through shock after shock after shock, he breathed and endured. Hours or minutes or days melted into each other, a blur of pain, of Emily reassuring him while she stroked his hair, and of him hoarsely screaming into the black silence. And when it finally stopped, when his voice had long given out and his body flopped to the floor, he slept.


	10. Communication

**Secure Unit, Quantico  
** **16:30 Same day**

“Alex!” Spencer enveloped his friend in an enthusiastic hug. “I wasn’t expecting you here.”

“I wasn’t expecting me here either,” Dr Blake replied, gently squeezing him in return. “But your Unit Chief was very persuasive.”

He smiled into her shoulder. “Yeah, she can be.” He snuggled a few precious seconds more before pulling back. “It’s good to see you.”

“Uh huh.” She kept her arms out, lightly holding him by his shoulders, head tilted while she considered him. He held still under her gaze. “Well, you look much better,” she decided, and tucked a stray strand of hair behind his ear.

He self-consciously re-tweaked his hair when she dropped her arms from him, and she gave a small smirk. He huffed a laugh with the remembered familiarity. This was… nice.

“I feel more real,” he agreed.

“Well, that’s not quite what I meant.”

“Oh, okay.” Alex didn’t seem worried so he moved on. “Um, why don’t we…” He looked about. There was no furniture in his cell-room.

“We could sit on the floor?” Alex suggested.

He nodded and plonked himself down. “So… is this a social visit?”

“Not exactly.” Alex sat down somewhat more circumspectly. “I’ve been asked to review the stimulus for your conversations with the unsub.”

“Oh.” He swallowed. “Did you know that the average person speaks about fifteen thousand words each day?”

“Spencer…”

He brazened through her interruption. “And that different situations cause us to change the pitch of our voice and our speech rate?”

“You’re deflecting, Spencer,” she chided gently. “And poorly too, I might add, since you know perfectly well I’m a linguistics professor.”

He waved away her objection. “Take the process of accommodation where we subconsciously mimic the speech patterns of those we talk to.” Alex frowned at him but didn’t interrupt this time. “You use more complex vocabulary talking with me than with Rossi for instance.”

“If you say so.”

“I observed that over our two years of working together, you used four syllable words 2.3 times more frequently when addressing me than when addressing Rossi.”

“Wait.” Alex said. “How do you…?” He opened his mouth to reply but she quickly shook her head. “Spencer, never mind.” And then, before he could take the conversation off in another direction, added, “You knew this was going to come up eventually.”

He minutely shook his head and transported himself. Tickly pine needles crinkled and crunched under his feet. Tree trunks hove into misty view and faded behind him. Scents of fungus and decay swirled, the forest a silent witness to his flight.

“What’s the hurry?” Emily asked.

“I don’t…” His ragged breath fogged crisp air. He slid a little down an incline, undergrowth and dry dirt sliding with him.

“Spencer,” Emily’s voice floated down from the top of the slope. “They know already.”

He swung his head to look at her ghostly outline.

“You told Tara, remember? I think your words were: ‘Yes, I colluded. I probably dictated most of that paper.’”

He backed away a step, but the pine needles here scratched at his soles, and he stumbled.

“You think they haven’t all read that paper?” Emily was abruptly beside him again. He jerked, losing his already shaky balance and crashing inelegantly onto his backside. She loomed over him, offering a hand. “Oops.” A tug and he was upright again. “You want to catch this unsub? Then find the courage to confess your sins, Dr Reid.”

He dusted himself off. “Tara didn’t think I’d done wrong,” he muttered.

“So?” Emily was regarding him with that penetrating gaze he found so difficult to meet. “It’s not about her. What do you think?”

“I think I conspired with an unsub.” His declaration was met with silence and he felt the need to elaborate. “Technically, my actions meet the definition of complicity. I was asked questions, and I answered them. I didn’t need to - I wasn’t punished if I didn’t. I was clearly advancing the unsub’s agenda when I did answer.”

“Okay.”

“Say something, Emily,” he begged.

“You want me to pass judgement?”

“Yes?”

“You naughty, naughty boy.”

He grimaced. “I don’t know why I thought you’d help.”

“I don’t either. Look, guilt - justified or not… it’s something you know will take time to work through. But in the meantime, there’s an unsub to catch.”

He nodded, eyes closed. After a moment, he whispered, “Okay.”

“Spencer?” Alex’s voice was soft. Worried.

“Yes, sorry.”

“You seemed to zone out on me for a moment.”

“I’m fine.” He mustered a smile for her. “Honestly. You just caught me a bit by surprise.”

“We can wait if you need.” He shook his head. After one last glance to be sure, she gathered up her notes. “Well, okay, so the paper suggests the triggers weren’t subliminal when you were interrogated.”

Spencer winced, unsure whether the questioning had been as harsh as the word ‘interrogated’ implied. Alex, heedless, continued. “The unsub seems to think you’d have answered without any conditioning triggers.”

Spencer looked away, unwilling to admit to himself or his friend that he’d been just that desperate for human contact. “That doesn’t mean I know what the stimulus was.”

“You didn’t detect it? Huh.” Alex made a note. “Well, the paper details a twofold trigger: a vaporized salt solution and a soundtrack of breaking waves.”

“A seashore?”

“Uh huh.”

He frowned. “I don’t… I don’t remember that.”

“Sure seems like an odd choice for a kid from Vegas,” Emily added. He swung his head to look at her. She’d found a chair from somewhere and was perched uncomfortably on the edge of the seat, legs crossed, looking down at them both.

“So, what _could_ you detect?” Alex’s voice pulled him back to the present.

He swallowed. “I could hear the unsub enter and do the usual housekeeping tasks. I had to be silent for that part. If I spoke, the floor…”

Alex gave him a tight smile while he took a deep breath.

“Then, after the unsub finished and ejected the disc, they’d sometimes stay and I’d hear a question.”

“And you’d answer?”

He looked down at his shaking hands. “Yes,” he whispered, “I’d answer. When I answered a question, there was… the unsub asked another.” In his lap his fingers were twitching to scratch. He clenched his hands into fists and looked up. “Uh, another question. If I didn’t reply, the unsub left me.” _Alone_, he didn’t say. _In the dark_.

“You were isolated and afraid.” Alex caught his gaze. “It was a lifeline.” He nodded. “Given your academic background, you may even have been interested in the methodology of the unsub’s research.”

His eyes widened and his breath caught. “You think I helped because I wanted to see the _results_?”

“Didn’t you?”

“No. No, of course not.”

“The unsub chose to offer you solace. It wouldn’t be surprising if you wanted to help in return.”

“No!” He choked out an instinctive denial. “I wasn’t… it wasn’t _Stockholm_! I’m a profiler. I know about dependent relationships.”

Alex settled back, giving him a few extra inches of space. “Okay,” she said.

“Alex, it really wasn’t Stockholm.”

“I believe you.” Her tone was sure, free from condescension, and he relaxed a fraction.

“Stockholm Syndrome is often characterized by a victim sympathizing with their abusers, even to the point of attacking rescuers. But do you know how extremely rare it is? The DSM doesn’t even recognize it as a condition. While Patty Hearst popularized our understanding-”

“Reid, it’s okay.”

“I never… I never deliberately tried not to answer though,” he said.

Alex took a moment to catch up with his change of focus, then she laid her hand on top of his. “I’m not surprised. Despite what you say, the unsub made you extremely dependent, Spencer. Anyone would want to keep a connection going in that situation.”

He sighed, recognizing the rationality of what she said, but unable to assuage his guilt. He plucked at the carpet threads and quietly asked, “How long was I in there?”

Alex’s mouth dropped open a little. “You… you don’t know yet?”

He shook his head.

“Almost a year. Eleven months.”

_Eleven_? He knew he’d lost track of time, but he was more than a season out. “Eleven months?” he croaked.

His friend squeezed his hand. “Yes. I’m sorry, Spencer.”

He sat still, mind reeling at her revelation, gradually calming at the feel of his hand in hers. After a while, he mused in a low voice, “It was something real. At least, I thought it probably was. Some of the questions… They weren’t how I’d’ve asked them. It helped… It was something other than fighting my mind. I often wasn’t even sure I was alive anymore.”

She let the weight of his words fall away before venturing, “And this is how the paper got written?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” He still hadn’t seen it to check.

“How about we try a few questions without the trigger to baseline?”

Spencer gave a jerky nod and shuffled back to the wall. “It’d… it’d start with a request to self-assess against Maslow.”

“Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?”

“Yeah.”

“Just normal speech?”

“Distorted; it was run through a synthesizer first. It sounded kind of robotic.”

“Okay, give me a moment.” Alex got up, left the room and came back with her phone. She downloaded an app, pressed a button and recorded herself asking the starter question. “And I think… if I click here… ready?”

Spencer nodded. Alex pressed a button.

“Tell me where you are on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,” demanded the phone in a metallic tone.

Spencer raised his eyebrows.

“Wrong distortion?” asked Alex.

“No, it’s pretty close.”

“Try answering it.”

“Oh. Uh…” Where was he? “Physiologically, I guess most of my needs are being met; I’ve got access to food, water, a washroom, shelter and clothes and I’m well rested, but not, umm,” he tripped on the word, “_sex_. Actually, that last one is contested as a true physiological need. Of course, I didn’t mention arousal in the Cell; it seemed prudent not to prompt the unsub, although given that I’d profiled for behavioral expertise, it’s likely my omission would have-”

“Spencer.” Emily’s wry admonition cut off his monologue.

Right. “Next level is safety.” He paused to decide what to say. “I don’t feel safe. I’m sorry. I know I’ve got 24-hour security here, but that’s because I’m under threat from an unsub and from myself. I’m worried about my mental health. So I just don’t. Feel safe I mean. Do you want me to carry on to the next need?”

Alex nodded. “Yes. Please.”

“Okay. Social integration.” He rubbed his forehead. “You know, I never got anywhere near this before. I was usually only able to hesitantly say I was getting adequate shelter, sanitation and water.” He sighed and kept rubbing his forehead while considering his answer. “You and I have our friendship, and this conversation we’re having now” - he waved at the small gap between them - “is ticking lots of interpersonal relationship boxes, so thank you.” He shared a shy smile with her. “On the other hand, I feel very isolated in this room and the BAU are overtly excluding me from some of their investigation.”

“Temporarily, Spencer.”

“I know. But it still means I’m not meeting my needs at this level.” He sighed again. “Is that enough? I don’t particularly want to examine my self-esteem or personal fulfilment too deeply at the moment.”

“Understandable,” she agreed. “Let’s move on. What would the unsub ask next?”

“Which experiments I’d completed that day.”

Alex hit record. “Reid, which experiments have you completed today?”

He frowned. “That’s… uh, the unsub never said ‘today’. It was always ‘since our last encounter’. And not my name, it was always ‘Professor’. I never made my mind up whether that was a mark of respect, a misunderstanding, or an attempt to make me disassociate.”

Alex clicked buttons. “Okay, how about this? ‘Professor, which experiments have you completed since our last encounter?’”

“Can you play it?” Alex duly did so. “Yeah, that’s, umm, that’s close. I’ve completed the Sleep Deprivation experiment, ma’am.”

Alex frowned but didn’t say anything. “What followed then?”

“I’d be asked to describe any stimulus I’d encountered, and how I’d reacted.”

“Okay. Why don’t you record this one?”

Spencer took the phone and pressed the appropriate button to record his voice. “Detail the start of the experiment, Professor, and your resultant actions.”

Alex took back her cell and pressed play without a word. Spencer frowned. “That doesn’t sound right.”

“Okay, don’t worry. I’ve an idea.” She clicked keys, recorded herself asking the same question and hit play again.

The frown cleared from Spencer’s face. “I smelled fruit, ma’am. Banana. I, uh, I moved intermittently.”

“Hmmmm.” Alex made a note and stood. “Look - can we take a short break? I’ll be back to try that again with the triggers, but I’d like to talk to Agent Prentiss first.”

“Sure,” he agreed as his Emily raised her eyebrows and ostentatiously pointed at herself. “And maybe I’ll try opening the blind a bit while you’re gone.”

His eyelids were still bathed in sunlight when the gentle susurration of water dancing on a pebbly shore started dancing in his ears. “This is really calming, Alex,” he breathed. He could stand here forever, chilling out with not a care in the world. It was like a hug from his mother.

“Tell me where you are on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.”

Dammit. Way to spoil the mood. He retreated to the back wall and sat down. “Should I run through it all again?” he asked.

“Do you feel you have to?”

“Not really,” he shrugged.

The scent of brine flooded his nostrils.

“And how about now?”

“Uh… still no?”

“Okay. Then just say if anything has changed.”

He reviewed his situation. “I’ve felt more isolated since you left the room,” he finally offered. “But I think the beach cues are helping me feel less anxious about it.”

“That’s good, Reid. Now, try not to answer the next question please.”

A moment later the disembodied voice boomed through the loudspeaker again. “Professor, which experiments have you completed since our last encounter?”

Spencer dutifully sat silent, eyes tracing a mote of dust dancing in the room.

“How difficult was that to do?”

“Fine.” Spencer shrugged. “I’m not feeling any compulsion here. This is actually really relaxing.”

“Oh good. Try answering the next one without thinking too much about it.”

“Okay.” He slouched against the wall and closed his eyes, half asleep with the lulling sound of water in his ears.

“Professor, what contact did you and I have in the month before your abduction?”

“We met occasionally for coffee in the Leavey Center, ma’am,” he replied. He’d been doing a summer lecture series at Georgetown University and their meetups had also served as an excuse - as if one were needed - to peruse the bookshop there. “You even finally gave me that tour of the psychology faculty.” He opened his eyes. Blinked a few times. “That wasn’t one of the questions.”

Alex and Emily Prentiss appeared in the doorway, looking down at him. “We think your unsub’s a woman, Spencer,” Alex said while he scrambled to his feet.

The two women exchanged a concerned glance. “And, uh, Reid?” Prentiss continued, “We think there’s a good chance she’s already inserted herself into this investigation.”


	11. Clean

**Secure Unit, Quantico  
** **18:30 Same day**

Rossi appeared in the doorway. “Shower time, kiddo,” he called.

Spencer scrambled to his feet, grabbed his respirator and joined his colleague for the walk down the corridor. He was waved into the washroom. “Get yourself striped to your shorts and I’ll be back.”

Reid did a double-take. “Wait: you’re showering with me?”

He was regarded with wry humor. “You think I’m here on account of your personal hygiene?” Now the older man mentioned it, it did seem unlikely. “We’ve temporarily rigged the pressure on these showers for a test.”

Spencer’s skin crawled with apprehension. “You rigged the…?” Oh god. “Please, Rossi, can we talk about this first?” 

Rossi’s humor cleared in the face of Spencer’s obvious dismay. “Reid, it’s just a shower.” He pointed at the pump by the shower stalls. “If it’s too much, you can even turn the power off yourself.”

“If you’re about to trigger me, then that’s the last thing I’m going to be able to do.”

Rossi paused to stroke his beard. “Okay,” he concluded after a while. “How do you want to do this, then?”

“Showers were a negative reinforcement, right?” His fingernail drew a line up the inside of his arm. “I had to stop the unwanted stimulus by taking the desired action.”

Rossi pretended to be oblivious to the self-inflicted, quickly fading mark. “One moment.” Pulling a small notepad from the pocket of his scrubs, he consulted notes. “Yeah, agreed. When the computer detected you stood with your arms raised, the water pressure was reduced. Where are you going with this?”

“I raised my hands. Every single time after I worked out what was going on. And I did that the _moment_ I heard the siren.” He bit his lip as it occurred to him that the presence of a subliminal trigger meant he’d probably been reacting to something else.

“You assumed the position. So to speak.”

Spencer rolled his eyes. “Funny.” He pointed at the pump. “You’re not about to subject me to an invigorating shower. You’re about to assault me with brutal over-stimulation. And _I’m not going to be able to move_.”

Rossi winced, crossed to the shower stall and disconnected the pump. “No pump. Got it.” He straightened up and wordlessly clasped Spencer’s shoulder on his way out.

**The Cell  
** **Months earlier **

It was secluded here, under the fall. Kaleidoscopes of color floated in the air, held aloft by the fine spray kicked up where the water dashed off the rock face. Ferns leaned into the moisture, lending their earthy scent to the damp undertones. Normal forest sounds faded behind the incessant pounding and roar of the water.

Spencer gasped another breath of misty air, the waterfall cascading into him and kicking up a fine, chilly spray. His surrender to the Shelf had pleased the computer beyond - there was no whine of machinery revving up to drill the water into him. Instead the flow cleansed, rivulets sweeping and curling down his body, drawn downwards by gravity and shivers.

The waterfall tapered off, and a faint trickle and glug could be heard as the stream found its slow escape from the Cell. Spencer deliberately brought the sun out to warm himself even while rolling his shoulders to take the ache out of muscles held aloft too long. He stiffly knelt and then lay down in the stream bed, rolling his back into the sinking water level and sloshing around to dampen the parts of himself which had not faced the deluge. By the time he was just grubbing about in the gravel, the sunshine had done its job and he’d warmed up again. He slicked the remaining moisture from his skin, shook out his hair and scooted backwards to rest against the bank. For a moment or two it held him steady, then the creeping roots of a nearby tree inexorably wrapped themselves around his aching shoulders.

He pulled himself free with a hoarse shout, scurrying forward from the bank. One hand fall missed, and he momentarily pitched forward, only just catching himself. With a gasp he pulled himself into a fetal position - drawn up so the invasive root couldn’t catch his ankle.

“This isn’t real,” he told himself. He opened his eyes. Sunlight sparkled off the jittering waterfall, dancing away every time he tried to focus on it: a complex hallucination then, but still _not real_. He blinked away the sparkles, and instead focused hard to craft a sun-dappled glade. Before long he could hear crickets hidden in the long grass and see a picnic blanket spread out, lemonade already poured into beakers and plates laden with pie.

“Spence,” JJ called, hoisting a plate to entice him. “Over here.”

**Secure Unit, Quantico  
** **18:40**

“I’m going to play the cue you heard,” Rossi warned on his return. “Then start the shower. You ready?”

Spencer considered. “Do you think it matters that the shower-head is above me?”

“Let’s hope not,” Rossi replied. “I’m not re-plumbing the washroom just for this.”

“Then I’m ready.”

Rossi pressed a button on an old-fashioned stereo he’d brought with him. The mournful wail of a police siren danced into the room. Spencer, a bit doubtful, put his hands over his head. “Owww!” he complained a moment later as a stick bashed into his side. He dropped his arms to rub at the sore spot. “What the hell was that?”

Rossi peered into the cubicle with a pole dangling from his hand. “Sorry, missed hitting the lever which turns the shower on. Didn’t want to get wet.”

“You hit me instead!” Spencer glared at his colleague receiving a nonchalant shrug in return.

“Don’t get in the way then.”

Spencer took a deep breath to quell his sharp retort. “Could I try not raising my arms? I kind of only did it last time to move this along. I think I could resist if I tried.”

Rossi nodded. “Sure.” He suddenly looked more cheerful. “Hey, here’s an idea: how about _you_ turn the water on?”

Attempt two left Spencer stood wrapped in a towel, dripping into the shower tray while he and Rossi agreed that - hallelujah - he wasn’t automatically triggered into standing still and raising his hands above his head by the sound of police sirens.

“Thank god,” Rossi said. “That could have taken some awkward explaining.”

“Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves.” Spencer shivered in the chill. “We still need to see what happens when you try the subliminal trigger.”

“Which is shower gel,” Rossi said. “We had to raid Walmart.”

Spencer’s eyebrows shot up. “How many?” Before Rossi could answer, he added, “And how are you planning to trigger me with it? Squirt it at me?”

“There are 863 brands of body wash and shower gel listed on the Walmart website,” Rossi said. “Garcia came back with one hundred and twenty of them.”

“One _hundred_ and twenty!”

“Which I will be opening one at a time until you strike the pose.”

“Assuming we can do this at the rate of one every 15 seconds, that’ll still take us half an hour.”

“You have somewhere you’d rather be?” Rossi teased, but he nevertheless stepped outside, wheeled in a trolley and presented it to Spencer. “Prego! One hundred and twenty different shower gels. Prentiss was fielding a _very_ interesting call from finance as I left.”

Reid however felt butterflies start in his stomach at the sight of the trolley. One of those small bottles probably held unfathomable power over him. “Can we just start?” he asked.

Rossi seemed to detect the change in mood. He nodded and moved across to play the siren, so Reid put the towel to one side and started the shower. As just minutes before, resisting putting his arms in the air took conscious thought, but he closed his eyes and successfully willed his hands to remain by his side.

He heard Rossi take a footstep closer, and then a soft instruction to smell.

He sniffed. “Lavender.”

“Yes, well done, scent-sleuth. But it might be quicker just to say ‘not that one’ in the future.” There was a rustle as he dropped the rejected gel into a waiting empty bag. “Next.” Another click, another footstep, another sniff.

“Not that one.”

“See? You’re doing great, kiddo.”

They continued in that way past 5 minutes, past 10, past the quarter hour. Bottle of gel number 68 started the same: a click, a footstep and a sniff-

Spencer blinked and found himself with his arms raised above his head and legs shoulder width apart. Rossi’s shocked gaze was fixed on him, his colleague standing with him in the shower stall heedless of the scrubs being soaked under the lukewarm stream of water. “Reid?” he said. “You back with me?”

“Yeah,” Spencer gasped. He self-consciously dropped his arms to wrap them around his torso and shuffled his feet together. “What happened?”

“You triggered off Nivea 3-in-1 body wash.” Rossi leaned across and turned off the water. “I hope that’s not your go-to cleanser.”

“No, it’s not.” But Rossi was ignoring him, thumping his palm against the shower stall, swearing under his breath. “Rossi?”

“Sorry.” Rossi drew back. “Give me a moment.”

Spencer gave him precisely seven seconds. They seemed endless. “Dave?”

“I’d not seen you triggered, Reid,” the profiler said, not looking at him. “Reminded me of… Well, it caught me by surprise is all.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Hardly your fault. I’ll go and get changed.” Rossi pulled open the door to the washroom and stepped out with a squelch. “I just hope we catch the bastard who did this to you.”

“You know, I’m sure there’s got to be a pattern, but I can’t see it.” Emily.

Spencer gasped and shot his hands automatically down to grab the towel, which was mercifully still within reach. “Wuh, what?” He flushed, wrapping it around his sodden shorts. “Em, I’m not sure this is the best… I mean, should - should you be in here?”

“In here?” She raised a perfect eyebrow. “Spencer, I’m a figment of your imagination. Besides, I’ve seen you naked for months now.”

“It’s always been too dark to see!”

“Details,” she said, dismissing his objection out of hand. “Anyway, what do you think?”

“What do I _think_?”

“About the pattern?”

His brain was conjuring the most _maddening_ hallucination. He took a steadying breath. “What pattern?”

Emily rolled her eyes. “Occasionally losing time since you’ve been back. _That_ pattern.”

He blinked. “Oh.”

He was standing, staring into space, mouthing the thoughts flying through his brain when Rossi returned.

“Here, take thi… Hey, you okay?”

“Rossi!” Spencer spared him an abstracted glance. “Have you got a pen?”

Rossi sighed. “Twelve years we’ve been working together, and you still ask me that?” He dug into a pocket and withdrew a pen and his bedraggled notepad. “Here.”

Spencer accepted the offerings, blinking in surprise at their state, then proceeded to wave them at Rossi rather than attempt to use them. “You remember how we conjectured that the subliminal scent stimuli were triggering an autonomous response?”

“Yes…” Rossi drew out the word.

“We’ve come across at least two exceptions: the first was TPD - the food stimulus - and the second was the, uh, the fruit which kept me awake. The key point being neither compromised my cognitive functioning. Admittedly, the combination of overt cue and - in particular - the subliminal stimuli eventually led to textbook classical conditioning. But it wasn’t fully autonomous. That must be significant somehow.”

“Oh, ye gods, I’d forgotten what this was like,” Rossi muttered to himself. “Spencer, I beg you: once again for us mere mortals.”

“Uh, if I can work out why I don’t always lose time, I might find a way to break my conditioning.”

“Now that I did understand.” Rossi plucked the pen and paper out of Reid’s grasp. “I’ll get you some replacements. Tempo di lavorare, genio.”

“Huh?”

Rossi gently thwacked Spencer’s forehead with his sodden notepad. “Loose translation: time for you to put that genius brain of yours to work.”

Emily gave a self-satisfied smirk. “Told ya,” she said.


	12. Heat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reference to end of Season 14 in this chapter. If you want to avoid spoilers, skip ahead to the fifth section.

**Secure Unit, Quantico  
** **20:15 Same day**

“Are you decent?” JJ called to him, ostentatiously facing the other way at the door.

Spencer sighed, knowing full well that she’d have just checked on him via the mirror. “Yes, Jayje. You’re safe.”

His friend entered and moved over to embrace him. At the last moment she hesitated and instead fussed over his hair, carding fingers through it to pull out the knots from his shower. She started to say something and then bit her cheek instead.

“What?” he asked.

“Do we have to talk, Spence?”

“Uh…” That was an awfully open-ended query. “Did you know that it’s estimated that less than 0.5% of the population experience a dissociative fugue in their lifetime but the incidence of dissociative disorders rises to over 70% following a traumatic incident?”

JJ’s expression flickered for a moment before she schooled it. She pulled back. “The incomparable Spencer Reid. Now I know you’re recovering.” Spencer frowned; her voice was just a shade too bright. “What’s it gonna take to hear the odds of a straight flush?”

He calculated. “You just need to divide the number of hands which give a straight flush by the number of possible combinations of 52 cards into unordered sets of 5.” That was her winning hand in the poker game just before his last case with the team; he was clearly missing something here. Still… “One in every 64,974 deals,” he said.

She pressed her lips together tightly, and nodded, carefully watching his expression. After a moment, she minutely shivered and turned back to the door. “We should work on your triggers,” she informed him. “Wait here, please, Agent Reid.”

He blinked, stung at her sudden formality. “Erm, okay. Waiting,” he acknowledged.

She re-entered carrying a foot pump and bicycle tire. “Does this pump look like the one you had in your cell?” she asked.

“I didn’t exactly _see_ it,” he started, then changed his mind in the face of her obvious antagonism. “But, er, yes. If we’re talking about turning on the heater.”

“We are.” She bent to place the foot pump and tire on the floor. When she straightened, she looked determinedly up at the corner of the room and blinked furiously.

“JJ, _please_,” he begged. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

JJ dashed at unshed tears with the back of her hand. “I wouldn’t _dare_,” she said, and held herself rigid as if she’d said something momentous.

Which of course she had. Spencer gawped at her. “JJ… didn’t, didn’t we already have this out? And decide that the ship had sailed and we would never, ever, _ever_ speak of it again?” Except he’d been conversing with his imagination. Looking at his distraught friend, he realized he’d managed a closure which had eluded her.

She drew a breath to speak, but changed her mind and looked away, shuddering through her exhale. 

He stepped back and ran his fingers through his tangled hair. “Having this conversation now is a really bad idea, Jayje.”

She slammed her hand in front of her mouth to hold in her reaction to his words. After a moment, she raised her chin. “Looks like we don’t need to have it anyway, Dr Reid.” And Spencer didn’t need to be a profiler to read the hurt and rejection pouring from her.

It took JJ twenty minutes to get from the doorway to the controls in the next room. Spencer decided not to call attention to her absence. “I’m ready,” he said softly when she checked on him over the comm.

“Right. I’m dimming lights and reducing heat now,” she told him, and her voice was nearly steady. The room chilled quickly. He shivered in the gloom and wrapped his arms around his torso.

“Well, you messed that up.” Ethan chuckled into his drink. As Spencer swung his head around in dismay, the drink was raised in a derisory toast. “Here’s to my forever celibate friend. May he one day find a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend. After all, who cares as long as someone gives him a good f-”

Spencer leapt to his feet, screeching, “Stop!” over the ugly words. He knocked the glass from Ethan’s hands, shouting him down. Dammit. He’d actually begun to hope his return might have heralded the end of the aggressive hallucinations. He took a rattling breath and frantically began to weave his forest into the carpet and up the walls. “I’m Spencer Reid,” he chanted, tendrils of ivy racing across the ceiling. “I’m a Behavioral Analyst with the FBI, and I went missing in August. I’m Spencer Reid and I know my team will save me…”

“What happened just then, Reid?”

Emily was standing with hands on her hips, pensively examining him as if he were some kind of exotic bug laid out on the floor. JJ was huddled behind her, and he didn’t need to see her quick shake of the head to know he shouldn’t talk about the circumstances which had led to his relapse.

“I saw Ethan,” he muttered, levering himself off the carpet. “I freaked out.” He pulled his eyes up from his feet and forced himself to look directly at his Unit Chief. “I’m sorry.” His gaze slipped away, and he dug his nails anxiously into his arms.

Emily was silent, doubtless while she debated with herself whether or not to dig into his obvious evasion. “We’ve been told to expect your hallucinations to drop off, Reid,” she eventually reassured him, and Spencer rejoiced that he and JJ weren’t going to have to dance around their miserable secret. “But it won’t be instantaneous. There’s no need to feel guilty in the meantime.” She started to say something then stopped herself. Spencer held still under her scrutiny, feeling like a naughty child being held to account. “We can stop here for the night if you’d like,” she finally offered.

He shook his head. “I feel fine now. If JJ is okay to carry on, then I’d like to.”

“I’m good,” said JJ.

“Fine,” Emily allowed. “But then the last ones will keep until tomorrow.” She nodded at them both and exited. “Get a good night’s rest, Dr Reid,” came her voice as she walked away down the corridor.

Spencer gulped. “What does that mean?” he asked JJ. “Why do I need a good night’s rest?”

JJ raised an amused eyebrow at him. “It’s just a turn of phrase, Spence.” His nickname slipped out without inflection; Spencer relaxed minutely since she obviously wasn’t still completely mad at him. “No need to be so paranoid.”

Spencer narrowed his eyes at her retreating back. Was that meant to be a joke?

His room was cold and gloomy again. “How’s this meant to work, JJ?” he called after a while of sitting bored in the silence.

“I’m just testing something,” JJ answered over the comm. “Sit tight a little while longer.”

It was more than a ‘little’ while by Spencer’s count when JJ contacted him again. “Okay. Could you try connecting the tire to the pump and inflating it?”

He scooted over and fiddled about with the valve and hose until he had a solid connection. Then he steadied himself against the wall, put his right foot to the pedal and pumped. He heard a hiss. “I think I’ve sprung a leak.”

“Ignore it,” she told him. “Just keep pumping until the pressure feels right.”

He shrugged and kept at it. His leg began to ache. “This is never going to fully inflate, is it?” he called eventually.

“Busted,” she confessed, and he immediately stopped for a breather. “We did hope you’d hit the right resistance first though.”

He swiped at the sweat on his brow. “And is it just me, or is it hot in here?”

“Isn’t that the point of this?” JJ’s voice sounded a bit perplexed. “I turned on the heater ten minutes ago.”

Right. Good point. “It really wasn’t as much effort as this,” he said. “Have you got a fabric plaster? I could stick that over the hole to slow down the air escaping.”

_Third time’s the charm_, Spencer thought to himself, and applied foot to pump again. The tire inflated quickly and although he could hear a faint hiss, it was very much reduced. By the fourth pump, he was meeting with satisfactorily solid resistance. “I think that’s it,” he called, pleased, and stepped back, enjoying the flow of warm air down his neck.

After a few minutes however, he began to get a prickling feeling of disquiet. “Have you turned on the trigger yet, JJ?” he asked.

“Not yet, no.”

“What’s the delay?”

“Give me a moment. I’m just testing something.”

He had a nasty feeling the ‘something’ was his behavior baseline. “I’m feeling agitated, Jayje,” he reported. “Like I want to pump again.” Oh, how misconstrued those words could be. On a different day, they’d be sniggering. “Are you sure about the trigger?”

“Try inflating the tire a bit and see if that calms you.”

Yeah, JJ was definitely baselining him ahead of turning on the subliminal trigger. He stepped up to the pump, gave it two presses and slunk back to the warm flow of air.

“Better?” she asked.

“Much,” he admitted, rolling his neck in cat-like satisfaction. “Gimme a minute.”

“Actually,” she requested. “Could you disconnect the tire, deflate it and then reconnect everything?”

He tensed, but complied with her directions. When everything was set up to her satisfaction, including the temperature once more being lowered, he sat against the far wall, picking at the carpet. “What is it this time?” he asked. “What’s the trigger?”

“Juniper,” she told him. “Sending it in in 5… 4… 3… 2…”

“Don’t get up,” she told him softly. “I’ll leave the heater on overnight and the lights are dimmed. I’m just clearing out the equipment.”

“Wha’ happ’ned?” he mumbled, hating how often he seemed to be asking that question.

“You intermittently pumped to keep the tire inflated for the 3 minutes I had the juniper scent in the room.” He gave a grunt of dissatisfaction and turned his back on her and the room. “We’ll sort this, Spence,” she whispered. “I promise.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” he breathed, and fell asleep.


	13. Light

**Secure Unit, Quantico  
03:45 Following morning**

“Reid.” A soft but determined voice called him from slumber. “Reid, wake up.”

He groaned and rolled onto his back, taking a moment to run his fingers over the floor to reassure himself that it was carpeted still. “Wha’sup?” he mumbled, twisting his head to watch as a shadow opened his blind to darkness beyond. “Prentiss?”

“Yeah.” The voice was still soft. “It’s a clear night. You can actually see Venus from here.”

He frowned, his brain slowly ticking into gear. “Venus? I thought it was August? Venus isn’t visible at this time of year.” He sat up and scrubbed his face. “You’re more likely looking at Jupiter.”

“If you say so.” Her profile still showed her gazing to the heavens. “It’s beautiful anyway.” Then her profile turned back to him. “Ready to test the next trigger? It’s the light one.”

“I guessed,” he acknowledged. “Although I don’t see a buzzer or CO2 sensor.”

“That’s because I haven’t brought them in yet. You awake enough to start?”

“Any chance of a coffee first?”

“Sure.” She stepped away from the window. “Let’s get them from the kitchen.” He got to his feet and fumbled in the gloom for his respirator. “Reid - leave it. We know this one’s triggered by caramel, and the final ones don’t have scents. We’re confident we’ve removed any potential triggers from the building.”

“Oh.” He grinned at her in the darkness. “So how many more are left to test?”

“You’ve got this one, then two more. Should be done by lunchtime, if everything goes to plan.”

Twenty minutes later and the electronics were set up on a small table, the circuit board barely visible in the starlight trickling through the open blind. “So, my suggestion,” Emily ventured, “Is to first run the sequence with you following your conditioning to make sure I’ve not disconnected a wire or something on the way over. Then we run it again with you trying to resist. Then a third time with the caramel in the room.”

“Okay,” he agreed, settling himself cross-legged in front of the table and starting to take slow and careful breaths. Emily took a moment to do a last check, then exited, closing the door behind her.

“Starting sequence now,” she called over the loudspeaker. And indeed, a second later a small buzz sounded in the dark. Spencer held his breath and a moment later the room was quiet once more.

“Looks like it’s working from here,” he called. “It feels pretty close to what was in the Cell too.”

“The paper included a circuit diagram and component list,” Emily said. “The author was very precise about this detail for some reason.”

Spencer quirked his lips. “Well, despite what you may think, that wasn’t me.”

“Fair enough.” They waited in silence for a while until the buzz sounded. Spencer again held his breath until it stopped after about 10 seconds.

“You know about the increasing timer?” he asked.

“Yeah. 30 seconds next.”

Sure enough, the buzz sounded again. Spencer sat quietly; 30 seconds later it stopped and he steadily exhaled.

“Huh. There’s no fooling this sensor,” Emily said. “It pings the moment you breathe out. How long did it take you to work out what you needed to do?” Curiosity laced her voice.

“I don’t know.” Spencer shrugged. “This panel wasn’t made active for ages. I wasn’t really tracking time too well by then.”

  
**The Cell  
Then**

“Did you know,” Reid lectured, “That in a sealed system it is impossible to distinguish between the effects of gravity and acceleration?” He plucked at the mesh under his hand; _plunk_ it replied. _Plunk, plunk_. A stately earthworm slowly wriggled its way across his index finger until he shook it off. “Whilst I can detect that I am resting on the floor,” he continued, double-checking with his remaining senses that he could, indeed, detect that still, “According to the theory of general relativity, that could either be owing to acceleration - uh, g-forces - pressing into me, or to the gravity attraction of a nearby large body such as… Earth.” A faint light caught his eye. He moved closer. And suddenly his Cell was bursting with stars, scintillations dancing across his eyeballs. Starlight from millions of galaxies away bounced around his retinas. He could see further than he’d travel in his lifetime. He craned his neck to watch as a shooting star skipped across the upper reaches of the atmosphere and plunged to its fiery death. “_Whoa_!” he said. And with a blink, the stars were gone. He sat still, shaking with reaction, eyes pounding with sparks.

“Emily?” he quavered.

“Yes, Professor Reid?”

“Did… did I just see, uh, that?” And shouldn’t he be ‘doctor’?

She shrugged her reply, unseen, in the darkness.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he muttered.

**Sometime later**

“You were droning on about special relativity,” she suggested. “You could try that again and see what happens.”

He bit back his retort, curious to see whether the illusion would repeat. “You’ve got the wrong theory,” he corrected. “Special relativity covers the implications of the universal constancy of the speed of light in a vacuum.” He ignored Emily’s mouthed ‘_whatever_’. “Now, here I am enclosed in a box. Do I know whether this box is being boosted through space or is stationary?” He paused for his inattentive audience of one. “This is the point you reply, Em.”

“You do know I flunked rocket science at Yale?” she grumbled.

He rolled his eyes and tapped the metal side of the Cell. As ever, the dull clunk fell away quickly.

“50-50, Em. Take a guess.”

“Earth then, genius. Occam’s razor: don’t overcomplicate things unnecessarily.”

“Earth it is.” His voice cracked slightly with the excitement.

“What happened to ‘I don’t know’?”

“Einstein’s thought experiment called for a closed system. However I can just hear when I tap the container. This isn’t a true closed system.”

She gave him a quizzical look.

“A vacuum wouldn’t suppress the reverberations: I can tell we’re still buried here.”

**And another sometime**

The stars were back. This time they twinkled, just like in the nursery rhyme. He was hugging them. No… he was… he was pressed up against the shelves.

“It’s a light pipe,” whispered Emily, awestruck.

“Mmmmm,” he softly agreed…

…and the stars went out.

**Again**

The stars were back. They twinkled, just like in the nursery rhyme, and buzzed, just like a bee.

He needed to hold his breath.

He needed to warn Emily…

…didn’t he?

**Sometime then**

“You were sciencing,” she said. “You could try that again and see what happens.”

He frowned, trying to remember. “Normally you’d sense the start of acceleration leading to motion but I’m not sure, uh, I’m not sure time is running exactly linearly here. I keep missing stuff.” Opposite him, Emily yawned. “Are you actually listening?”

“God, no,” she said.

“Well you should be. We need to know if the stars start again.” He pushed imaginary glasses up his nose and shook off an invasive tree root. “Now where was I?”

“Trying to convince me we’re in outer space.”

“Oh, yes, right.” He absentmindedly nodded his thanks before collecting himself with a start. “I mean, obviously, no. That’s not the point here. What general relativity tells us is, we don’t know.”

“Uh huh, Professor Reid.” Emily nodded sagely. “Half of us don’t _care_.”

**And again**

The stars were back. He made a wish - no prizes for guessing, Emily - and he held his breath.

And held it…

The stars twinkled, partly due to the onset of light-headedness from oxygen deprivation.

…And held it.

Out there, he could see other worlds but could see nothing of his own.

…And held it.

By the time he gasped, every limb shaking, he was being assailed by crashing feelings of disconnection. For while he could see other planets, no earthly sight, sound, taste or smell crept into this small prison of his.

**Secure Unit, Quantico  
** **04:01**

Spencer shuffled a bit so he could peer at the stars through the window. After a while, the loudspeaker came to life to ask him how he was feeling.

“Fine,” he replied. “No agitation. Just a normal wish to be helpful to my boss.”

“Normal, huh? I’ll remind you of that one day.”

His unseen grin was suddenly interrupted by a quiet buzz. He gasped in surprise, and was instantly cross with himself for being caught out. 50 seconds later, he needed to exhale. The buzz extinguished.

“That’s it, Reid,” the loudspeaker told him and a moment later the door cracked open. “That’s all that was in the paper.”

“Yeah,” Spencer agreed, gaze firmly on the view outside the window. “That’s all I ever got too.”

“That made for approximately two minutes of light.”

He reached out a finger and cautiously tapped the CO2 sensor. “You can train yourself to hold your breath for longer, you know. The record is over 24 minutes. It gets pretty uncomfortable after the two minute mark though.” As if blowing out a candle, he puffed out. The inactive circuit didn’t react. “There’s also an increased risk of nitrogen narcosis or pulmonary edema.”

“Did you get light much after the first activation?”

He thought back. How often had he seen the stars through the light pipe? “I think so?” he hazarded. “Only at night though. I didn’t see daylight at all.”

She didn’t say anything, but her hand came down on his shoulder, and he realised she must have known this given the time the trial was taking place. “Okay. Let’s run it again. Try not to react this time.”

“No problem.” He hoped it wouldn’t be. He set his jaw and glared at the circuit board, daring it to tempt him. “Ready when you are.”

He managed to gasp out breaths through the first two short buzzes. “You’re doing great, Reid,” Emily encouraged. “Now see if you can also make an incorrect response for the longer one.”

He gritted his teeth, and resolved to do just that. But when the buzz sounded, he couldn’t make himself breathe.

“Sorry,” he apologised 30 seconds later. “I’m… I couldn’t…”

“Don’t worry, Reid. Try again on the next,” came the reply. “Since this one will keep going, just breathe when you can.”

He was a bit shaken by his previous failure, so when he heard the buzz, it took a few seconds to resolve to sabotage his starlight. He pulled at the carpet, steeled himself and billowed out a giant breath. The buzz immediately stopped and he couldn’t help a little wail of upset passing his lips.

“Reid, don’t panic. Look out of the window: the stars are still there.” His wide eyes fixed on the loudspeaker instead. “Look at the stars, Reid,” Emily reassured him again. “You’re in Quantico. I’m not taking away your light.”

He scrambled to his feet and strode across to the window. Leaning his forehead against it, he drew in a few deep breaths, fogging the pane in front of him. “Okay,” he said eventually. “That was no fun.” He drew a squeaky finger through the condensation on the pane in front of him.

“I’m sure.” Emily’s soft voice was back in the room with him. “I’d like to run the caramel test once you’re ready. And so you know: the unsub seemed to think that you’d retained non-autonomous cognition.”

“I’ll be able to detect this?”

“And maybe even resist it.”

“Oh.” It made sense: if he wasn’t aware enough to experience the benefit of seeing the starlight, then his brain had no reason to subject his body to the rigours of breath control. He felt buoyed up suddenly, and crossed from the window to the table. “Then I’m ready when you are.”

She nodded and left the room. A moment later, the loudspeaker crackled to life. “Sending the caramel in now…”

“Reid?” Emily was in the room with him. He turned his shocked expression on her. “You back with me?” He bit back the ‘what happened’ and just nodded. “Guess the unsub wasn’t quite right, huh?”

He pressed his fingernails into his arm. There wasn’t really anything to say to that.


	14. Touch

**Secure Unit, Quantico  
** **09:00 Same day**

“Oh, my poor baby!” Garcia said, her fluffy hairstyle, colorful glasses and make-up in sharp contrast to the subdued grey scrubs she wore. She abandoned the cardboard box she was carrying onto the floor beside him. “I heard.”

Spencer looked up from his game, rook in hand. “You heard?”

“About last night.”

With a snap, the tree stump and chessboard disappeared, and he was back in his gloomy, empty room. “Right. Last night.” He opened his hand and the rook vaporized too. “I, uh, I don’t really have a clear... that’s to say... I don’t actually know what happened, Garcia.”

“Oh!” She looked a bit flummoxed and surreptitiously checked the mirror behind her. “Oh.” 

He frowned: she’d just reassured herself that a colleague was on hand to help if needed. He was scaring her - or the situation was. Almost without thinking about it, he ducked his head, pulled his knees up and minutely scrunched down, making himself smaller, less threatening.

“Oh honey.” She bit her lip. He waited. “So... you stopped breathing.”

Which was bad, but nothing new. He continued to wait, scrunched up on the floor. Garcia’s anxious body language - weight shifting from foot to foot, gaze darting around the room - was telling him there was more to come. 

Eventually she filled the silence. “… until you passed out.”

He flinched, hard, and she took an involuntary step back. “Caramel renders me _unconscious_?!” he bit out.

Garcia gulped and just stared at him, wide-eyed. The door opened and JJ stuck her head in. Spencer watched while she exchanged a reassuring glance with Garcia.

“Spence,” JJ said, turning to him, and the calm, assured way she spoke did nothing to assuage his misgivings. “We’ve updated the official report to record that caramel renders you immediately _unresponsive_. You also cease breathing for a period of about 3 minutes - at which point you lose consciousness. You then recommence respiration, even with caramel present in the room, but as soon as you begin to come around the cycle restarts. It then repeats until the scent is removed.”

The sound of her voice was being replaced by an increasing ringing in his ears. Still, he knew she’d finished speaking because her mouth had stopped moving. His head fell to his knees and his fingers found his hair, pulling at strands as he attempted to self-soothe. Cerebral hypoxia was no joke; nor, for that matter, were the bends, decreased heart rate, increased blood pressure, muscle spasms or risk of brain damage associated with voluntary apnea. That the breath-holding in his case was _in_voluntary didn’t change the side-effects. He’d been as cautious as he could bring himself to be, holding his breath while watching the stars. And now it turned out all the while he’d been engaged in an unwitting game of Russian Roulette. How often had the team done this to him testing the trigger? How often had the _unsub_?

JJ’s voice penetrated his musings. “Reid? Does that answer your question?” How long had she been asking that? “Reid?”

He shook himself and lifted his head. “Yeah,” he croaked, and coughed to clear his throat. “Thank you. Very clear.”

“Okay.” She looked doubtfully down at him. She jerked her head at Garcia and the two ladies stepped outside and had a murmured conversation which abruptly cut off when the door shut.

He uncoiled and deliberately meditated, focusing on his body from the tip of his toes to the top of his head. He thought that maybe he should be grateful for the ease with which he was steadily inhaling and exhaling, but how wrong was it to find himself grateful for that? Still, the action of contracting his chest and relaxing his diaphragm to compress air in his lungs to a pressure above atmospheric, followed inexorably by the reverse: expansion of his chest and contraction of his diaphragm to breathe in, was soothing. Internal to his alveoli, gases were exchanging to keep his CO2 and O2 levels in balance. Hemoglobin and red blood cells raced around his body, circulated by his heart. Metabolism in his cells -

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Emily interjected. “I thought you wanted this over? Time to get triggering, pretty boy.” He flicked open his eyes to his tired, empty room. Only a cardboard box was in sight. “What’s in the box, Spencer?”

He sat up and pushed aside pondering why Emily had reduced herself to an auditory hallucination. Instead he tried to work out which trigger the team were planning to test next. He was only aware of one, and he thought the box could well contain it. He scooted across and peered over the top. Black material covered a lumpy shape. He stretched out an arm to tweak the material aside.

The door flung open, startling him. “Ah-ah,” Garcia admonished, still keeping her distance. “_Wait_ just a moment.” She narrowed her eyes and glared, and after a moment of surprise Spencer realized she was searching him.

“Garcia?” Spencer put up an unsure hand and rubbed his face. Had he fallen asleep while meditating and inadvertently drooled?

But Garcia abruptly straightened. “You’ll do,” she announced. “You can look now.” He waited a beat to be sure then cautiously reached in, tweaking the material aside to reveal an elaborately twisted metal wire mounted on a wooden plinth. The wire swooped this way and that and was no more than about half a millimeter in diameter. A small metal ring looped around the wire at one end, and a shaver was in turn attached to the metal ring. The shaver itself was unremarkable with the exception of its power cord, which was no more than an inch or so long.

Spencer shuffled back and kicked the box away from him. “No.” Garcia frowned at his obstinance. “Forget it. I’m not doing this with you here.”

**The Cell  
** **Earlier sometime**

He was high up in a tree, curled so his feet were on the branch, head resting on his knees and back pressed against the gently swaying trunk. Light hit his closed eyes; warmth caressed his limbs. Leaves were rustling, birds were calling, insects were buzzing and scratching, a panel pinged. The smell of fresh air surrounded him: sticky pine resin mixed with his sweat and a faint trace of-

“Spencer.” Emily walked along the branch towards him, impossibly keeping her balance as it bowed under her weight. “The Shelf summoned you.”

He sighed and deliberately toppled out of the tree, landing without a scratch. He opened his eyes to blackness and closed them again.

“It was the shaver one,” Emily prompted. “Want me to get it?”

He sighed at the illogical mess his illusion was creating. “You can’t interact with real objects,” he told her.

“Well, one of us needs to go,” she insisted.

He sighed again, got himself on hands and knees and crawled across the mesh floor, stopping after five shuffles. He put his hand out and pressed, unlatching the panel door and pulling at the handle the panel revealed. It slid smoothly with a faint whoosh of metal runners extending. Emily appeared on the other side of the pulled-out shelf and checked it visually while he was carefully running his hands across the contents to check nothing had changed.

It was as expected. The shaver one end, the plug socket the other, and a complex, serpentine route between for him to navigate without letting the metal ring touch the electrified wire. It was the buzz wire game on steroids. “I’m turning my back now,” Emily reassured him.

Spencer rolled his closed eyes at his crazy apparition; he’d long since given up wondering why his subconscious felt the need to protect his modesty from an imaginary friend who wouldn’t have been able to see a thing in the darkness if she had been real. He slid his threadbare shorts down his legs, carefully felt for the metal ring and wrapped the material around it. Then he pulled the insulated ring along the track of the wire to the end, replaced his shorts, and made the necessary electrical connection.

Emily turned back around when she heard the buzzing of the razor slam into the Cell’s silence. She tilted her head this way and that watching as he carefully ran his face over the shaver. “You missed a bit,” she pointed out. Spencer pressed his fingers to his skin where she indicated. He hadn’t. “Oh. Well, don’t blame me; it’s dark here.”

The timer pinged while he was formulating a reply to her nonsense. The power cut off and a switch made, causing the tiny power cable to retract much like the winding on a vacuum cleaner. The shaver was pulled from his unresisting hands. When he heard it rattle into its storage spot, Spencer put out a hand and helped slide the drawer shut. He sat back on his heels. A magnet engaged.

“Well, that was entertaining,” Emily exclaimed while he was running his hands across his once-more smooth cheeks and chin. “What do you feel like doing next?"

**Secure Unit, Quantico  
** **09:05 Same day**

Garcia’s eyes lit up in understanding. “Oh, no, you don’t need to… We know that you used…” Eventually she stopped floundering to pick up and hand him some black material. “Here,” she said.

He shook the material out. Black shorts. A momentary flash of anger shot through him that he had exactly no secrets left before he tamped it down. He needed to know his triggers, and this was one of them.

Avoiding Garcia’s apologetic gaze, he helped her lift the buzz wire game out of the cardboard box and lay it on the floor. He knelt next to it without being asked. Garcia drew out her phone, pressed a button, and played a microwave-type ping.

He knelt unmoving long enough for both of them to be sure he wasn’t compelled to respond. Garcia nervously cleared her throat a few times, and Spencer realized… “You need me to do this anyway?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

He wrapped the material around the ring, yanked it to the end of the wire track, plugged in the power cable and bent his face to the almost-immobile shaver, closing his eyes.

A couple of minutes later he was done. It took him a moment to realize that the shaver wasn’t going to retract on its own, so he placed it carefully on top of the game.

“Are we done?” he asked quietly, still avoiding catching her eye.

He heard Garcia swallow. “We are. And Reid?” she whispered, her tone conveying how crestfallen she was, “I so, so wish this hadn’t happened to you.”

He lifted his eyes and winced at the fear and pity he saw in her. “Yeah. You and me both,” he agreed. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holding your breath beyond a minute or two can be a really bad idea, particularly near water. Before any attempts, please be responsible and research the risks.


	15. Hope

**Secure Unit, Quantico  
** **12:30 Same day**

“I’ve a visitor for you,” Alvez said, pulling the door open. “Say ‘hello’ to your furry friend.”

Spencer pulled his gaze from watching the comings and goings of the base out of the window and zeroed in on the wriggling object cradled in Luke’s arms.

“Hope?” he croaked, hardly daring to believe it. He took a few uncertain steps towards the door. “How...?”

“We got your unsub,” Alvez told him. “Here.” He eased his load into Spencer’s unresisting arms. “This fluffy bundle came to light when we searched the grounds.”

But Spencer was hardly listening. He stroked the hamster’s back and tickled behind her ears. “Oh my gosh. I knew you’d be beautiful, Hope,” he told her, and there was a lilt to his tone. The animal snuffled up to his face, its whiskers tickling. “I am so glad that - that you’ve arrived here safe,” he added. He backed to the wall, still stroking the skittish animal and slid down it until he was sitting, humming. He buried his face in her fur and inhaled. Hope gave a jitter as he stopped the tune, and scratched his arm.

“Owww,” he sang at her. “Okay, okaaaay. I love the fireside when all the lights are low. Boom dee ah dah…” He kept going, sometimes humming, sometimes tweaking a word here or there, sometimes harmonizing, but always the same children’s round, again and again. “...love the rolling hills,” he murmured into her ear. “That’s it, Hope.” And he hummed a few more verses before softly singing, “I love the mountains. I think she’s settled now. La la la la...” He faded his voice to almost nothing and looked up expectantly, humming under his breath.

Alvez sat quietly in the corner, transfixed at the gentle scene. “Luke?” Spencer sang softly. “I’d love to know what. What came to bring her here?”

Luke shook himself. ‘Is it okay to talk?’ he mouthed.

Spencer hummed while he considered. “I think could you maybe - just sing the words a bit?”

Luke’s eyes widened. “Er…” He shot a glance to the window, then his shoulders fell, resigned. “Umm. We… we found the unsub.” He spoke the first phrase, but with Spencer humming along, his voice first took on the cadence of singing, then gradually adopted the melody too. “She works with Alex Blake. Helped with our profile.” He missed a line, thinking how to phrase his words. “When you said you had a tour, of White Gravenor Hall-”

“And I said ‘ma’am’…”

“Yeah, saying ‘ma’am’.”

“Our profile matched?”

“Yeah. Garcia needed to- gah…” He broke the song, unable to keep the rhythm maintained. “Garcia apparently ‘did a thing’. Of all the female faculty staff you might have met during your tour, only, uh, I forget how many but it was like a handful, had a grant rejected for behaviorism-related research in the timeframe.”

Reid hummed his understanding.

“Financial records gave us Meredith Song: turned out two shipping containers and a bulldozer were delivered to an abandoned industrial site off the Interstate last year. SWAT helped us raid it this morning after we got a warrant.”

“Ah,” Spencer replied musically. “Is she in custody?”

“Yeah. We’re working up the charges.”

Spencer pursed his lips and hummed awhile, unable to help thinking how anticlimactic this resolution was. “I’d like to ask her-” he started, but Alvez interrupted.

“We don’t think it would be a good idea for you to see her, Reid. She’s by no means contrite. She’s fixated on finding out how you are getting on with overcoming her programming.”

“I know I can’t see her,” he continued softly. “But I’d like to know - why she picked me.”

Alvez gave a non-committal huff in reply. “This singing. Is it for you or Hope?” he asked, changing the subject.

Spencer let the conversation move on. “I think it’s Hope,” he crooned.

“The hamster’s asleep.”

Spencer looked down instinctively to check. Sure enough, Hope was asleep. He narrowed his eyes, understanding immediately what Alvez was getting at. Still, he clung to the comfort the nursery rhyme was giving him. “Your point being?”

“You sing when Hope is here or you randomly get an electric shock, right?” It was a rhetorical question, and Alvez ploughed right on. “When you stop singing, Hope runs away before you’re both zapped, and you lose your pet’s companionship.” Spencer, eyes still narrowed, nodded. “Intellectually, you know this floor isn’t electrified. And you also know that with the reinforcement gone, your behavior will extinguish pretty quickly when the punishment is removed.” Alvez leant forward. “So, stop singing, doc.”

Spencer tightened his grip on Hope, and she squirmed a little in her sleep. “I love the thinking. But you missed something out. Result of not singing. Is not immediate. Sometimes the floor zapped me. Sometimes it made me wait. The theory goes. Conditioning. Is more effective. Randomly.”

For a moment, Alvez looked like he might argue the point, mouth turned down and fingers dancing against the carpet. But as Spencer continued to softly hum into Hope’s fur his disquiet slowly cleared and instead he stood up. “Okay. Guess we’ll work on it later then.” He opened the door and pulled a cage inside the room. “Pop Hope in here.”

Spencer shuffled across and gently laid the sleeping hamster inside. Alvez carefully pushed the cage outside the room and Spencer caught a glimpse of hands reaching down to collect his pet before the door closed again.

Spencer heaved a sigh and lay back on the carpet. “God, that’s exhausting.”

“I’ll bet. You feeling any musical compulsion now?”

“No. Just mild embarrassment.”

“Flippin’ weird thing to condition you on.” Alvez shrugged. “Anyway, your pet was the last trigger. Prentiss asked me to let you know that you now have free access to the interior of this building. Although you’re to stay away from the decontamination room. And Tara said she’d meet you for lunch in the kitchen at” - Alvez glanced at the wall clock - “Oh, now actually.”

Spencer stood. Tara was here? “We’re done? I can go?” Alvez waved him through the door, so he grinned and exited.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that seems like a good point to end part one! It’s been a blast sharing this with you so far - thank you for your kudos, comments and speculations.


End file.
